Cheryl's A Font-O-Holic
I have recently downloaded and installed some new free fonts. But when I try to use them in email they look good to me but the ones I send email to - say they don't see them. Do you know why? What am I doing wrong? Thank you. Cheryl

Answer 
You're not doing anything wrong, Cheryl. One of the most misunderstood things on the Internet is how fonts work. If you download some new fonts and install them, you'll see them perfectly on your computer. And when you write an email you'll see them perfectly. But, unless your recipient has the same font installed they won't see your font. Your font is not being "changed" it simply doesn't exist on the recipient's computer, so the recipient's default font (usually Arial or Times New Roman) is displayed. Windows will always display the default font when the font specified in the source code of an HTML email is not available on the system on which the the email is being read. The same thing is true of those who create Web pages. We have over 9000 pages on our Web sites and most of them specify "Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Times New Roman, or MS Sans Serif". Why do we only use these fonts?  It's not because they're so pretty; it's because they're found on all Windows systems. Therefore all Windows users can see the font as we see the font.

And, yes there are font embedding products, bitmap fonts and other technologies that enable Webmasters (and highly sophisticated emailers with access to a Web server) to use specialty fonts. But this is not wide spread, even today, on the Web. You can use these technologies in email too. But it's complicated, requires a Web server and frankly it isn't worth the trouble. Yikes! Before we go off on some verbose tangent, let's just say font-embedding and bitmap fonts are not things the average user would want to use for a simple email.

But, if you have a font you really can't live without and you'd like your recipients to see it as you see it, you could send the font to your friends and have them install it. If they have the font installed, you can use it and they'll be able to see it..