{font-family:} for fonts in emails?

Question

Is there an email equivalent of the CSS property font-family? As emails don't embed the font, the reader has to have the font installed on their computer. If they don't, the font will render in Times New Roman (or another default font.)

Is there a way to define multiple backup or fallback fonts?

Answer 1

See this article about CSS in emails. Most mail clients don't support a head element in HTML emails, so non-inline CSS is out. This means you can't use CSS3's @font-face to declare custom fonts.

However, you can specify fallback fonts by separating multiple fonts with commas. For example:

font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Answer 2

If you are using Outlook or something similar, you can use HTML rather then CSS to encode Google Web Fonts, and have the fonts load up as a template each time you want to write an email.