how to display background color in outlook 2010 html email?

This method works across email clients:

<table bgcolor="#3399ff" style="background:#3399ff;"><tr><td>test</td></tr></table>

I was struggling with the same issue and found out that Outlook doesn't support the name of the color like modern browsers. I changed:

<tr style="background-color: lightgray">

to

<tr style="background-color: #d3d3d3">

and Outlook loved it.

You can also do it this way - styling in the td cell.

<table><tr><td bgcolor="#3399ff">test</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td bgcolor="#3399ff">test</td></tr></table>

This will NOT work on Outlook 2010. If you want to style background-color in Outlook, you'll have to put your background style in style attribute, like this

<table><tr><td bgcolor="#3399ff" style="background-color:#3399ff">test</td></tr></table>

Plus: If you want to style background IMAGE (not color), default Outlook 2007+ will not support it, but you can do some tricks to make that happen. Check out this link : https://litmus.com/community/learning/25-understanding-background-images-in-email http://backgrounds.cm/