Fonts in the Native iOS 10 Mail app?

[iphonefreak450]

I use Outlook 2013 to send and receive emails from my Windows computer and whenever I check the sent items on my iPhone using the native Mail app, it defaults to Times New Roman fonts. Even when I sometimes send emails to myself from my computer and open that message on my iPhone, the message body still has the fonts displayed in Times New Roman.

So whatever messages I send and receive on my computer will also show up on my iPhone Mail app as well.

However, when I get emails from external people most of the time it is shown as the normal Arial font.

Thanks!

 

[friednoodles]

The answer is "Because Outlook": if you're sending HTML email with Outlook it defaults to sending using the Calibri font, which isn't on iOS or macOS, so Mail falls back to the default HTML rendering engine font of Times New Roman.

Outlook's HTML support is terrible, so it neglects to even include a fallback in its font definition to the system default sans-serif font (e.g. "font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;") so that devices without Calibri would display the message with a somewhat similar font instead.

(But then you might ask: Why, in 2017, is the default HTML rendering font still Times New Roman? Why don't they change the default font to something better? Unfortunately we can thank the legacy of the internet for that. I believe if no font is specified at all, Mail does use its default display font which is sans-serif and therefore looks decent, but if a font is defined in an HTML message with no fallback and the font isn't found, the HTML engine then defaults to its default serif font of Times New Roman. And it's the default rendering engine font because it always has been. The question of changing the default HTML rendering engine font has actually been brought up on some of the HTML rendering engine development lists over the years but every time it happens they decide to leave it as Times New Roman so that legacy sites are still displayed as closely as possible to what they used to look like, with the idea that no one in their right mind these days wouldn't include a fallback in their font definition anyway, so the default font will never be seen... except the developers of Outlook clearly aren't in their right minds, so we end up with Times New Roman. Even the Blink engine still has Times New Roman as the default font - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=297047 ).