Outlook 2007 / 2013 not rendering CSS font-family declarations

Question

I'm testing an email design with Litmus and for the life of me I cannot get my fonts to be properly set in Outlook 2007 / 2010 / 2013. Every single HTML / CSS trick / hack continues to render in Times New Roman:

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I'm mostly using simple tables for layout, so all content is ultimately inside a TD element.

Here are the various techniques I've tried to set the font.

My STYLE declaration: Have tried this in both the HEAD and BODY tags & neither works.

<style>
@font-face {
    font-family: proxima-nova;
    src: url('assets/ProximaNova-Reg.otf');
}
@font-face {
    font-family: proxima-nova-blk;
    src: url('http://assets/ProximaNova-Black.otf');
}
body *, td, p, li {
    font-family: font-family:proxima-nova,'Proxima Nova Regular','Proxima Nova',verdana,sans-serif;
}
</style>

CSS STYLE attribute set on TD elements:

  <td style="font-family:proxima-nova,'Proxima Nova Regular','Proxima Nova',verdana,sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; font-weight:300;font-size:18px;">

FONT tag with both FACE and STYLE attributes set:

<font face="proxima-nova,Proxima Nova Regular,Proxima Nova,verdana,sans-serif"  
    style="font-size:28px; 
    font-family:proxima-nova,'Proxima Nova Regular','Proxima Nova',verdana,sans-serif;">

Inline CSS STYLE attributes on all inner text elements (P, LI, A):

I am COMPLETELY baffled. On all other relevant clients everything is working as well as can be expected (i.e. fonts are rendering as I'd expect given various bugs & rendering weirdnesses), including iOS, Gmail, Outlook 2003 / Express, etc.:

Answer 1

I traced the issue to my STYLE declaration, which uses the @font-face to pull in a custom font file for supporting clients (i.e. Apple). Apparently, something about this use of the @font-face declaration breaks in Outlook 2007 - 20013.

<style>
@font-face {
    font-family: proxima-nova;
    src: url('http://assets/ProximaNova-Reg.otf');
}
@font-face {
    font-family: proxima-nova-blk;
    src: url('http://assets/ProximaNova-Black.otf');
}
</style>

I needed to get MS Outlook to ignore this STYLE tag, so I wrapped the entire block with the [if !mso] tag:

<!--[if !mso]><!-->
<style>
@font-face {
...  
}
</style>
<!--<![endif]-->

Wow, that was driving me crazy.