let's go to waimart to buy a tooi

All email should be text-only with no HTML at all, displayed in a monospaced font across the entire interface, and I'm going to show you why.

I recently had to add two misspellings to my email filters, waimart and tooi. Both of these "words" do not exist outside of email spam.

The entire reason these "words" exist is to fool the reader, you, into thinking they're something else. It's an exploitation of many sans-serif fonts.

This is best shown by example:

Here is a phrase using a sans-serif font:

And now the exact same phrase using a monospaced font:

If you're thinking the two phrases are different, you're wrong, they're the same. A capital I on a sans-serif font looks almost identical to a lowercase l.

And when I say the monospaced font should be across the entire mail interface, I'm not kidding.

Take this example:

Do you think you're reading that correctly?

It's actually this:

Still think you're reading it correctly?

Let's change that to uppercase:

I'll guess you probably saw what it actually was in monospaced lowercase.

Now imagine the sans-serif version in a tiny font displaying the From address in your mail client or phone. Do you think you would catch it then? I doubt it, regardless of how good your eyesight is.

Bear in mind that field is not part of the message but rather a different part of the mail interface...

...which is why I say a monospaced font should be across the entire mail interface. From field, Subject field, To field, and the body of the message. All of it. No exceptions.

If you have the ability to do so, switch over everything you can in your email to display in a monospaced font only. And if you can do the same for your text messaging app on your phone, do so.

Monospaced fonts is whatever "looks like typewriter", such as Courier New or PT Mono.