I write in Arial - It arrives as Times New Roman

Question

Hi, I have a problem with iMail.
In my settings I have set arial as the standard font and all messages im my inbound and outbound box also appear as arial to me. Recipients of my messages though receive them in times new roman and in a different font size. I've been trying all day to fix this problem but everything I try doesn't work and since I use my mac for business I would really like to control the layout of my mails... Can anybody help me? Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

LOswego wrote:
This is a major problem for Mac users sending email for business to PCs. One must have confidence that the message will look presentable and not goofy -- which it often does. (Not only is Times Roman substituted, but I can assure you that sizing can be changed, making it look like childish shouting.)
We use Lotus Notes in our business and you're lecturing me about Mac e-mail looking goofy
In following this discussion string, it's incorrect that the problem is with the settings on the PC side in Outlook. PCs sending Arial to other PCs in HTML don't get fonts substituted to Times Roman, as they do with Mail.
Sorry, but the problem really is on the PC side. Apple Mail has been a standards-compliant mail program from day 1 while none of the major PC mail clients (Lotus, Outlook, AOL) have ever been. Many of the new "HTML" mail features in Apple Mail are an attempt to try to get fancy, formatted e-mail messages across to PCs that have never supported the official ways to do fancy, formatted MIME e-mail. Unfortunately, there is nothing standard about that.
I've tried the 'workarounds' suggested in terms of making Preferences be the correct font or NOT the correct font as recommended, yet the problem still exists, at least for me.
One Mac Genius at a store pulled down the Mail Format menu and felt the problem was the Macs have option of Rich Text but not true HTML as with Windows Outlook menu options. Could this what's causing the issue?
If Mail can't correctly play nice with the world of Outlook, I've got to (gulp) use a Windows-oriented email program on my Mac.
What is the difference? Mail is supposed to be about content instead of fancy presentation. If you have something that you want to look a particular way, send it as a PDF attachment or something. E-mail has inherently very weak support for any sort of formatting. That is just the way things are. For all you know, Outlook is looking at the internal header that identifies the software used to compose the message and saying "Whoa! The sender didn't use Outlook to compose this message. It could be spam or a virus that could crash Windows. I'll need to substitute all the fonts and disable style sheets to ensure the e-mail is safe". Granted, this is unlikely, but certainly possible.
What is even more likely is that these businesses have various PC spam filters in place that munge up all the data before it even shows up on Outlook. This is very likely and certainly not Apple's fault.
Your best bet is just to avoid fancy fonts in e-mail messages if you aren't sure they will look good on the other end. Send PDF or DOC attachments instead.