That mysterious J in emails | Hacker News Reader

That mysterious J in emails

blogs.msdn.com

146 pointsdomino36 comments

Ahhhhh

Back in the late 90s, I used to read comp.compilers heavily (I think I might have read it all on deja, to is beginnings) and cc'ers had a habit of saying something in their messages, then answering themselves in their signature, worded as a quote by some "john". For example

  Hi, I am looking for a BLISS-16 compiler for DEC Alpha.

  - russ
  [I don't think there is a bliss-16 compiler for the alpha. -john]

I found the practice humorous and meta, so I started using it in email.

Years later, I discovered it was no ironic humor, but the messages where actually edited by the moderator, John Levine, who signed his own changes. I can recall at least two people who I have sent such "ironic" messages who would have been quite confused by it, both of them famous compiler hackers and cc readers. One of them was John Levine :-P

Cargo Cult humor.

To add to the potential for confusion in that example, one of the DEC engineers that worked on the Bliss compilers was named John. (Seriously.)

Interesting story, but I doubt that the "!!!!1!!11one!!" part is to make fun of leet.

On the contrary, I'd say that this was to make fun of people who type in all caps (using Shift). In their hurry to write a great all-caps comment, they miss the Shift key once in a while, leaving a '1' behind instead of '!'. If anything, this would be the "elite" group making fun of noobs who can't type properly. Dusting in some "one" or "eleven" is just the next step in geeky humor.

That's why I make sure to throw in a !!!!!!!!!-e^(pi*i)!!!!!! every so often.

1337 != actual elite.

I've got some LED fans that beg to differ.

You're certainly correct.

Finally. What the hell. I thought I was out on some joke, or for some reason a lot of people at my company ended their sentences with "J" like "JK" but were lazy.

I do my work on a Mac and I use the default mail client. I figure those sending me e-mails do so through outlook. I get this stray "J" all the time.

When I saw the title of this link it elated me because I was finally going to figure out what the hell was going on.

What a horrible thing to do by Microsoft. either they're naive enough to think people won't ever read email outside Windows, or, more likely, clever and arrogant enough to deliberately degrade the experience for non Windows recipients.

I also assumed Hotmail was intentionally degrading messages received in (explicit) Unicode from gmail. My em and en dashes showed up in Hotmail as oddly accented As, leaving Hotmail users to assume there was something wrong with Gmail.

I use Thunderbird which also doesn't render the smiley face - even on Windows where Wingdings is installed. It doesn't seem to want to let me choose that as a font in e-mails - no great loss I'd say.

Didn't take me all that long to figure out that it was supposed to be a smiley face though - seemed pretty obvious from context?

Messages like "I like your latest work, j/k"?

Yeah it confused me for a long time. After enough time and context I figured it was something that amounted to a happy face or a wink or something, but was some start-up colloquialism I missed out on.

Here's a solution for those actually using Office and wanting the smiley to degrade gracefully into a :) instead of a J

http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-and-...

I learned early on that this was a degradation of a smiley face, but what surprised me is when I'd see it in emails which had gone through only Microsoft components: from Outlook to Outlook through Exchange, the J would still sometimes show up.

One could have assumed this behavior would be consistent along the way.

I've always wondered what that was ... I get it on every email from one person.

It's a placeholder for missing thoughts. The person is using your inbox as a drawer for their drafts.

It leaves traces as a webdings font tag, so it should be programmatically detectable. I'd love it if Gmail implemented a fix for Microsoft's legacy bug.

Why? Then they'd concede that Microsoft are the true kings of the internet, and that their arbitrary application of undocumented ad-hoc protocols is something the rest of the world should spend resources catching up to.

If they did, however, they should put a yellow notice-bar in there saying "This messages contains non-standard extensions specific to Microsoft Office users. It has been cleaned up to the best of our abilities."

This is especially annoying if you are among the minority uses Gmail in your company where everyone else uses Outlook.

One mystery in my office finally solved. I was wondering too, WTH is this J and the end of the emails I receive frequently from the management.

You can tell this is the case by looking at the preview of the message in the popup notification. There Outlook never uses wingdings so if a smiley is early enough in the message you'll see a J in the preview but a smiley in the actual message.

I wrote a Thunderbird plugin a few months back that people may find useful to hide this issue in received mail at least. It changes wingding J, L and a few others to the unicode smiley, etc. http://github.com/richq/smileyfixer

It doesn't fix outgoing mails, so when you plain text reply to the original author they'll get their "J" right back at them :-)

Now I found the phantom character! Whenever I got an email from someone they'd randomly have 'J' in it for me and a bunch of other people who received it (I used thunderbird, and most everyone else I talked to use gmail). It's odd that Microsoft didn't use an ascii/unicode special character or a embed image in the email (alt-texting it).

Coincidentally, a standalone L is the equivalent of a frownie face: :(

I still don't get it: why is that smiley face added there in the first place? The mysterious J appears in emails from people that certainly wouldn't 'sign' their email with a smiley face.

Outlook auto-corrects a variety of smiley-type -- :) :-) etc. -- into the aforementioned J.

That still doesn't explain why it would be in a message from someone who wouldn't use a smiley in the first place.

How do you know they didn't intend to enter a smiley face?

Because he never gets smiley faces from them. Of course, he gets a suspicious number of Js.

Well, there have been people whose emails would consistently end in a J on a single line. And these aren't people that would end their mails with a single smiley on the last line. Some of them probably don't even know what a smiley is.

...do their names start with 'J'?

Interesting. I never encountered it in my years of closer relationship with Microsoft. Must have happened after 2000/2001.

I don't see what makes this so amusing.:wq!

So J Allard (that Xbox guy) was actually Smiley Allard.

That gives quite a different impression.

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