Web safe fonts vs. web fonts

There are two types of fonts that can be used in email; Web safe fonts and web fonts.

Web safe fonts

Web safe fonts make up the below list and are found across the majority of computers, devices and operating systems.

When you use a web safe font as live text in email, it's almost guaranteed to work when your customers are viewing your email. For this reason, we recommend you stick to a web safe font.

• Arial
• Helvetia
• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• Courier/Courier New
• Tahoma
• Georgia
• Trebuchet MS
• Geneva

For brands, a web safe font will not always be inline with branding and in these cases a custom web font can be used.

Web fonts

Web fonts are fonts that are designed to be used on websites. Unlike standard system fonts, which are installed on a user's computer and can be used in word processors and other applications, web fonts are downloaded by the browser from the internet when a webpage loads. When someone accesses a website, web fonts are defined through CSS.

Web fonts embedded via CSS import can be used within your emails, however compatibility can differ across email clients - only around 30% of email clients support web fonts^*.

Here's a list of email clients that have full support for web fonts:

• Apple Mail
• iOS Mail
• Android Mail (not Gmail)
• Thunderbird
• Outlook for macOS

Some Outlook versions for Windows have partial support and Gmail doesn't support web fonts fully.

We recommend using web safe fonts as a fallback, although this fallback may not be used as some email clients use their own default font as a fallback.

For example Gmail uses Arial as a default fallback, and older versions of Outlook (such as Outlook 2003) use Times New Roman as a default fallback font. So keep these in mind.

Gmail also supports Roboto and Google Sans since they use those web fonts itself.

^*Based on reported email client support from caniemail.com

Using fonts in your email

To understand how to define your fonts in email, see our documentation on fonts and theme set up here.

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