Random letters are bolded in emails

[Red Squirrel]

A while back I imported fonts from Windows to Linux so I get more choice when using fonts for picture editing and stuff like that.

Since then, most emails that come in have random letters bolded, they're not actually set as bold but they render as bolded. Really annoying trying to read emails like this. This particular one is just spam, but it's just to show an example of what I mean:



Seems to do it all the time to the same letter combinations like tt.

Any way to stop this from happening?

I changed the default font in Thunderbird, but I think this particular font is default in some mail clients as the sending font, so it's probably not using the default because it was set as this font. Not sure what it is otherwise I would just delete it, but I imagine other fonts may do this too so may as well try to fix it properly.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Check the e-mail source code; it might actually be bolded. Inserting HTML formatting tags is a common tactic that spam messages use to evade primitive keyword-based filters.

 

[Red Squirrel]

This started when I added the new fonts. It does it to real emails too, I just did not want to paste the content of a real email so just opened up a random spam one. If I go to reply if I edit the text, it's not bold. It renders as bold but I can apply/remove bold and it stays the same for those two letters. If I start typing it will do it too, like if I type tt it will bold them.

It seems the font rendering engine is having trouble with some fonts for some reason.

 

[theevilsharpie]

I just encountered this problem on my work computer today, and only on a combination of certain letters. In my case, it seemed to be specific to the font 'Calibri' when rendered below a certain font size. Switching to a different font or forcing the font size larger resolved the problem.

I didn't really have time to look into it further, but this problem definitely seems to be font-specific. In fact, come to think of it, Microsoft's new fonts have always rendered poorly on Linux for some reason.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I forgot to post back, deleting that font fixed the problem. Now emails are just defaulting to another font instead. I'm guessing a popular email client defaults to that font when sending email as it was set right in the email itself and how I found out what the font was.