hurrah. i have done it. there may be a neater way, but
cellspacing="1" border="0" style="background:yellow"
for the whole table, then the 1 pix space between cells becomes yellow, and then on each row set
style="background:black;"
to set the color of the cells. and you end up with a nice 1 pix matte border round all cells. marvelous. will appear soon.
i think the blockquote tag just puts a box round the whole kaboodle.