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What’s with the J in Emails?

This has bothered me ever since I saw it appearing in emails:

I’d love that J

WTF is that “J”? Does it stand for “joke”? “Jesus”?

After a while it became apparent that it’s somewhat equivalent to a smiley face, but I was still puzzled by it until I peeked under the hood today and found an email sent from Outlook with the following bit in the HTML part:

I'd love that <span style="font-family:Wingdings">J</span>

A-ha!

When rendered using the Windings font, indeed you get a smiley face:

I'd love that J

And the text/plain part of the email actually does contain the regular :), so you’d only see the “J” showing up if your device is trying to display the HTML version but it doesn’t have the Windings font available.




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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at 3:52 pm and is filed under i18n, microsoft, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.


4 Responses to “What’s with the J in Emails?”

  1. mrbus2anywhere Says:
    December 13th, 2011 at 9:49 pm

    Man- thank you for sorting out the J….it really got to me too! So glad someone could sort that out for me…it's embarrassing to ask people who send you the J, I mean we're s'posed to be on the pulse aren't we. J

  2. Todd Van Hoosear Says:
    December 24th, 2011 at 3:54 am

    This had been bugging me for a while. Thanks!!

  3. George Says:
    January 9th, 2012 at 4:57 pm

    Thanks Wil, I couldn't figure it out for ages!

  4. wil Says:
    January 10th, 2012 at 12:24 am

    me too :)