Outlook 2013 Ignores font-family

Question

What is the best way to specify the font-family when coding emails for Outlook 2013? I have found that font-family is ignored when it is added inline like this:

Answer 1

How are you building your emails? If you are using tables then

<td style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">

Will work fine in ANY client. Only need to use a span if part of the text in the differs from the rest.

Outlook 2013 DOES NOT ignore in the header. I know this because I've built a lot of emails and I style a:visited in the header so Outlook (specifically) doesn't change them purple and it definitely works!

EDIT: A more accurate answer would be for me to say no unfortunately you have to specify the style inline everytime. (Didn't see that bit of the Question at first!)

Snippet:

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: center; color: #000000;">

Some text here.....
</td>
</tr>
</table>