CONVERTING A TEXT-BASED EMAIL MESSAGE TO AN EMAIL MESSAGE INCLUDING IMAGE-BASED FONTS

An email message is analyzed to identify sections of characters having a common formatting characteristic. Sets of character images are generated for the characters in each section. An analyzed e-mail message is converted from a rich text format to a platform-independent format that specifies the structure of the e-mail message. A set of replacement instructions is generated for use at a message destination. The platform-independent format, the character image sets and the replacement instructions are all transmitted to the destination. At the destination, the message is rendered by using the replacement instructions to replace each character in the message with one of the character images in the character image sets. The message can be displayed at the destination system with the same fonts and font attributes used originally used in creating the message, regardless whether those fonts exist on the destination system.