Direct Mail comes with a large number of fonts built in that are "safe" to use in your message. However, you may have a font on your Mac that you want that Direct Mail flags as "unsafe". This help article explains what that means.
How Fonts Work in Email
When a recipient opens your email, their email client renders the text of the email on screen. Your email includes HTML code that tells the email client which fonts to use when rendering text. The email client uses that information to look up the correct font:
- If the font is already installed on the device, it uses the installed font
- If the font is not installed on the device, it tries to download it using information included in the HTML code of the email
- If steps 1 and 2 fail, it uses a "fallback" font that is specified in the HTML code. This is usually a standard font that comes on all devices and that looks somewhat similar to the original font.
- If all else fails, it uses the default font
Not all email clients support step #2.
“Email-Safe” Versus “Unsafe” Fonts
In Direct Mail, you will see that fonts are either marked as "email-safe" or "unsafe".
- Email-safe means that Direct Mail will include in your email all the code necessary for your recipient's email client to download and render the font as you intended.
- Unsafe means that it not possible to include the necessary code and very unlikely that your recipient's email client will render the text in the correct font—a fallback font will be used instead.