Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com