What web-safe fonts should I use for global audiences?

Arial and Tahoma are your safest choices for global email typography. Both fonts include extensive character maps covering Latin scripts (Western and Eastern European), Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian), Greek, and many other writing systems. They're installed on virtually every operating system and render consistently across email clients. The utwo criteria that define \"web-safe\" for email purposes.

For Asian languages, system defaults are often best. Specifying \"sans-serif\" as a fallback allows the operating system to substitute appropriate fonts for Chinese (SimSun, Microsoft YaHei), Japanese (Meiryo, Yu Gothic), or Korean (Malgun Gothic, Gulim). These system fonts are optimized for their respective scripts and provide better readability than forcing a Latin font to attempt character rendering it wasn't designed for.

Your font stack should be explicit about fallback order: font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif;. If your brand requires custom fonts, use them for headings where web font loading is more likely to work, but default to safe stacks for body copy. Typography serves readability first-a beautifully branded font that renders as boxes for half your audience is worse than a boring font that everyone can read.