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Comment by stratocumulus0 | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.

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Apparently it was the <font> tag in the emails (guess it had to be a HTML email): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

So funny, my mother would send me emails from work and I would see J every now and then. First letter of my first name is J so I kept thinking she was just referring to me but she was sending a smiley face

In had exactly the same experience when emailing my father.

The conversion from emoticons to wingding J's occurred at the server level. I've sent emails in Mutt through an exchange server that, when quoted back to me, had the ASCII smileys converted to J's.

Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of emails sent through them.

Perhaps the emails have both html and plain text representations, and you've configured your client to only show the plain text version?

you almost got it!

This was likely winmail.dat/TNEF[0], Microsoft's proprietary replacement of HTML.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...

TNEF is a container/encapsulation format rather than a markup language. It can contain HTML as well as RTF and plain text.

Granted HTML rendering of email is full of quirks in Outlook

It's using Word to render html. They tried using a browser engine but then it rendered a copy-pasted Word text differently and users hated that.

Now that they are transitioning the desktop version of Outlook into an Electron-like webview, I suppose showing HTML directly in the webview is out of the question, and they must be using the Javascript version of Word to render HTML...

If you ever though nobody had an use-case for WASM...

And everyone on Microsoft ecosystem hates the new Outlook version.

We already have the 365 Web version for that.

Yet another example of Microsoft's failure to hire employees with native Windows development skills, now with the old guard that grew up with Win32 are reaching retirement age.

Haha I too was confused about this J character for a long time and took it for some corporate thing when I first started out on a full time corporate job.

Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in outlook.

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