Lately I’ve been recieving mails with the letter “J” in seemingly random places. At first I thought I had gotten old, the world around me changed and people were starting to replace the smileys with single letter J’s. I thought it meant “Joke” and carried on.
Recently I noticed other people being puzzled by the J’s aswell, so I thought I’d find out where the J’s come from. It actually turns out to be a technical problem when using Microsoft Outlook to send smileys.
Microsoft translates a “:-)” into a smiley character from the wingdings font. When the mail is sent, the character encoding of the mail screws everything up and by the time that I recieve the mail in Thunderbird it has become a “J”.
Until Microsoft solves this, try to refrain from using smileys, or turn off the “show emoticons as icons” feature.
There’s a fix for this problem at :
http://blog.tcg.com/tcg/2008/03/j-instead-of-sm.html
Thanks for the tip! This will solve it for Windows users. I haven’t tried it on my Mac yet, but I’m not getting any hopes up.
OMG, so that’s it! I just saw it used by a friend and then my brother and thought it was a typo by the former…! LOL
Thanks for the info!
that figures!
Thanks that’s been driving me crazy and I didn’t want to look stupid and ask her what she meant. Nice save!
Thanks for the info 🙂
fix doesn’t work Thunderbird 3 >
I had always wondered what those were, thanks!!!
OMG,this is what actually happening.Tx.
wow, i know this is a really old post, but do you know what the “T” is supposed to mean? I get the j’s all the time, but I’ve gotten a couple T’s and I haven’t a clue as to what it means
Maybe you should try Leo’s fix, see earlier comments.
😉 still not fixed and will probably never be… because whole world should have wingdings installed in their mail clients ;d