The message will be rendered using the default font used by the e-mail software.
In case of HTML e-mail, CSS font-family "stack" priority should apply.

In that case, it seems one would want to send emails in a font that is very likely to be in the possession of the recipient, to eliminate change to the structure of the email from rendering into something else. Does this make sense?

Yes, it makes complete sense. It does, of course, severely limit your options.

Thanks for the helpful replies.

Yes, this is why traditional "web-safe" fonts and font stacks are usually used in email. Most email clients do not yet support @font-face, which would allow for arbitrary fonts in HTML email.

Text email has no concept of fonts. It's simply transmitting text and rendered in a way the reader prefers.

HTML email is something much uglier. ;)

To insure that the recipient can see your message as you designed it, create a pdf with fonts embedded, and send it as an attachment. You could also create a Rich Text Format document (.rtf in Windows). Emails received on mobile devices or received via audio (yes, that's possible too) might not even be able to see attachments, though.

Any idea of when email will support @font-face?

hhp

Any idea of when email will support @font-face?

It’s not a problem of e-mail per se, but of rendering engines used by e-mail software (for example, Outlook is using Word’s HTML rendering because they couldn’t afford to license IE’s one – I’m not kidding). Since most e-mail clients can display images hosted on remote servers, there’s no reason why they couldn’t do the same with remotely hosted fonts.

> create a pdf with fonts embedded, and send it as an attachment

Another option is to save it as a graphic and insert the graphic into the html email.

I'd probably get annoyed if someone sent me routine emails that way, but it might be ok for special ones like an invitation.

Or, you could write a letter...

To insure that the recipient [is annoyed by your email] create a pdf with fonts embedded, and send it as an attachment.

This morning I got an email that seemed to be using a webfont.
Is that just luck in terms of all the parts clicking? And if all the
parts don't click I guess it just defaults to something available.

hhp

IIRC, Apple Mail is the only common mail client that supports @font-face. What are you using, Hrant?

Gmail on Firefox 9.0.1 (the latest I think) on Win-XP (SP3).

hhp

Well, so you were just looking at HTML rendered by an @font-face capable browser.
Not different from viewing any web page with fonts embedded.
Who composed that e-mail is either forward or wishful thinking ;-)

Similar discussion going on at CSS-Tricks.com.

So what modern-day email system doesn't handle HTML?

hhp

what modern-day email system doesn't handle HTML?

It's not about handling, but how well they do it:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/08/e-mail-is-not-a-platform-for-design/

E-mail doesn't even fully support Unicode yet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_and_e-mail).

I still use Eudora. And if the version I have does handle HTML (which it might not), then I’ve turned it off on purpose, because I prefer not to receive email in HTML.

I also block large images. My bandwidth is too limited and precious to wait for promotional emails to download a crap-load of kilobytes.

To paraphrase Sergeant Friday: “Just the text, ma’am.”

If something interests me, I’ll click on the “View this in your browser” link. That’s what browsers are for.

Call me a Luddite ;-)

You know, that's a great point that email in browsers could be generally @font-face enabled. Sweet!

In my case, I get my work email in Outlook, but my personal email in gmail, usually in Chrome. (And both sometimes in my iPhone's Mail app, which also supports @font-face.) So my personal email may always support @font-face, I suppose. Assuming that gmail passes through the inline CSS to the browser or viewing app, mind you.

One complication for @font-face in email even in the future will be that it presumably won't play well with anybody who doesn't want other people leaching their bandwidth. Folks generally do that via checking the referrer string in the get request. To make this work with email, I think the font hoster would have to allow "localhost" as a referrer, but that would enable *anybody* to borrow the code and use the same font in email (though not for external web sites), with the original host footing the bill for the bandwidth. Leastways that's what it seems like at first thought.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that because of this, web fonts for email would be pretty much be restricted to Google Web Fonts.

T

I still use Eudora.... If something interests me, I’ll click on the “View this in your browser” link.

And boom, Netscape Navigator shows you everything you want to see, right? ;-)

Well, I use mutt and HTML mails are dumped to plain text with w3m; I really hate HTML mail.

@font-face wouldn't make a whole lot of sense in webmail unless the webmail client did heavy lifting to make sure the CSS was applied only to the message itself and not the page as a whole.