Is it true that newsletters in HTML should have a “table-based” layouts?

Question

I read somewhere that when creating a HTML email, you should use the table-based layout. You should not care about creating tableless css based layout. Is that true? I have

Answer 1

This is probably more based on the reality of email client rendering (which is terrible) than anything else. Technically it's almost certainly wrong, but pragmatically it might be the best advice. Truppo touches on this.