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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T10:32:05+00:00

I’m currently trying to solve an issue with Outlook html emails. If I take

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I’m currently trying to solve an issue with Outlook html emails. If I take a simple (about 85-100kb) html email like this, and forward it to myself within Outlook:

<html>
    <body>
        <table>
        <tr><td>Hello</td><td>World</td></tr>
        <!-- Repeat the above row about 1-2000 times -->
        <table>
    </body>
<html>

Outlook naturally adds some of its own markup. I don’t mind the extra/messy html, but the number of font definitions is absurd: over 24,000 fonts are specified. This causes the email to take at least 30seconds – 1 minute to load. (Not to mention the size bloats to over 2MB – but this is secondary)

/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
    {font-family:Helvetica;
    panose-1:2 11 5 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;}
@font-face
    {font-family:Courier;
    panose-1:2 7 4 9 2 2 5 2 4 4;}
@font-face
    {font-family:"Tms Rmn";
    panose-1:2 2 6 3 4 5 5 2 3 4;}

So the question is: Does anyone know where Outlook generates this list of font definitions from? There’s some crazy looking stuff in this list that doesn’t even look a font:

@font-face
    {font-family:"?&not\;\0027 ??S?V??N Pro R Cyr";}
@font-face
    {font-family:"?&not\;\0027 ??S?V??N Pro EL Cyr";}
@font-face
    {font-family:"_ae&\#143\;6f- c5z d1";}
@font-face
    {font-family:"\,  l\,  r -  l  \0027  &copy\;   CE";}
@font-face
    {font-family:"$B\#M\#S\(B $BL\@D+\(B\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;";}

Any help greatly appreciated

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    We spent a lot of time with MS Support on this to no avail. Apparently Outlook caches fonts from incoming emails (unbelievable I know) somewhere in memory and includes them in every outgoing HTML format email. So if a user receives an email with a huge number of corrupted font definitions, this will get forwarded to every subsequent recipient until outlook is restarted. (It’s almost virus-like)

    The resolution is to upgrade to Outlook 2012, which has allegedly addressed this issue. Microsoft would not provide a workaround or patch for 2010, citing it as a case of “works as designed”.

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