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Comment by chrisfarms | Hacker News Reader

What I really like is when you get random J's in emails from people.

Took me a while to figure out this is some kind of autoreplace thing in Outlook that switches out emoticons with characters from the wingdings font, and J is a smiley face.

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Raymond also answered that question on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/60474...

WingDings mapped the 'J' character to smiley face; when the email goes to a client without that font installed, it just displays the original character in the default font.

Old New Thing is an awesome blog! J

The latest Unicode updates should fix this. All those glyphs are now mapped to Unicode points instead of ASCII, so if someone has an updated Wingdings font, it won't be a 'J' anymore.

(It will be a box with a question mark, probably.)

If the sender has an ASCII Wingdings, and the receiver has a Unicode Wingdings, the receiver gets a J (at least if the receiver is using Apple Mail).

That makes so much sense! The people I correspond with at work now seem much less professional.

There's also a common sig about "Please think twice about printing this email" with a wingwings of a little tree. That turns into some plain character as well. Maybe G? I kept wondering why everyone was ending their emails with G.

I also wonder how much energy is collectively wasted sending that extra line in every email. It must add up to something from a storage, energy use, rendering, etc perspective. I wonder if it offsets any behavior changes that may help the environment by those who actually don't print. I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing.

The character is P - until recently I thought it was supposed to be an initial, since the sentence begins with "Please"

For reference: http://i.imgur.com/I1GET1w.png

Whoa .. I had no idea.

Do you know how it looks to outlook users?

http://thinkbeforeprinting.org/get-the-message.php

Heheh font tags...sweet.

I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing

On at least one occasion I've printed an email and ended up using an extra page because of the extended "Please think twice" section.

For months I thought my girlfriend was signing her emails with her initial. It wasn’t until I saw her typing an email to a friend that I realised what was going on.

Thunderbird users, there's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/smiley-fi...

That's probably the worst possible fix. Why fix something that should not be there at all? MS broke comparability with other email clients by introducing such one-way conversion to graphics, a fix must be on their side.

Wow, I was wondering about that just yesterday. It seems to be common among realtors and mortgage company underlings - people that I don't normally have to deal with, but that are likely to use emoticons to end every paragraph.

I do deal with realtors every day... my god, never in my life have I met such an illiterate group of so-called professionals.

It's one of the few potentially decent paying professions someone without a college degree can get into without insurmountable entry barriers, so perhaps you should go a bit easier on them.

It doesn't look to me like he's discriminating against realtors for not having gone to college; he's bashing them for actual demonstrated poor literacy, which is a lot harder to excuse than not going to college. (If you meant to instead make a more reasonable complaint about him painting with an overly-broad brush, you should have said so.)

Yes - I applaud them for being successful professionals without going to college, but college shouldn't be necessary for basic literacy.

Basic literacy is perfect grammar and spelling now?

College or not, anyone involved in deals involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars should not be writing emails that look like a text message written by a 12 year old. Perhaps I'm selecting the wrong measure of quality, but if a realtor were to send me an email punctuated by a plethora of smiley faces and three periods at the end of sentences, I would find another realtor. I say this based on experience, and the one that communicates with email that appears to be written by an adult turns out to be the one that doesn't annoy me by not listening and showing me houses I have no interest in.

I was just displeased as you were I'm sure to find out that a billionaire used smiley faces too

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53358dd4ecad04e75a8...

I'm not seeing "a plethora of smiley faces and three periods at the end of sentences" in that image... :)

"Thanks !! Eric" nearly sent me over the edge. Did he ever moonlight as a realtor?

It isn't fair to call them illiterate any more than it would be illiterate for me to not understand all the intricacies of real estate law. At some point, we as technologists gave them this communications tool without actually engaging with them in its proper use, and they learned the lowest common denominator etiquette.

When my teenage kids text me, I make sure that they use complete sentences. I'm a bit of a bastard that way, but hopefully they'll be better off later on in life.

I think Kluny's point is the the emails were an incorrect use of the English language not an incorrect use of email.

I am a mortgage company underling and can confirm that almost everyone at my company, and the realtors we deal with, use tons of emoticons. I think it's the only way everyone manages to stay sane in this business.

I would not be able to stay sane if I had to look at tons of emoticons every day.

Another Raymond Chen (blog post author) on the that topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/60474...

I do hate software that auto replaces :) with a graphic emoticon.

You can disable this in Outlook: Outlook Options → Mail → Editor Options → AutoCorrect Options

Tom Scott touched on this in his Computerphile video -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITwM5GDIAI

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