Thanks; looking at it now. It looks a lot like an old program I used to use for ad-blocking called DNSKong. But it's not a Eudora plug-in, so it doesn't help here.
(Incidentally, it's "incontrovertibly" English can really suck at times.)
Something must have gotten lost in translation. The only reason I mentioned ad-blocking is that you mentioned:
I didn't even know Eudora supported plug-ins! But if it does, your idea sounds good to me.
I'm aware of .woff files, and it's true that, as of IE8, mshtml.dll didn't support them:
But that's not the only problem with sky.com's HTML emails! To prove this, try editing @Dave-H's original HTML, changing
url("//www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-regular.woff") format("woff")
url("//www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-medium.woff") format("woff")
to
url("//assets.sky.com/fonts/sky_regular.eot?") format("embedded-opentype")
url("//assets.sky.com/fonts/sky_medium.eot?") format("embedded-opentype")
Those .eot files do exist on sky.com's servers - I checked - and .eot is supported; but IE8 will still open it with a progress bar that "stalls" for several seconds.
But if you instead change
@import "//helpforum.sky.com/html/assets/toolkit.css"
url("//www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-regular.woff")
url("//www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-medium.woff")
to
@import "https://helpforum.sky.com/html/assets/toolkit.css"
url("https://www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-regular.woff")
url("https://www.sky.com/assets/fonts/sky-medium.woff")
merely adding "https:" in front of each double-slash, IE8 will now open the file without the progress bar stalling, even though you loaded unsupported .woff files!
Seems obvious that the delay is caused by protocol-relative URLs, not by unsupported font files.