
Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J” - arishi
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-outlook-fixes-j-smiley-emoticon-emoji-bug-2017-5
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bobisme
That's what that was!? I aways wondered why some people would end their emails
to me with "J". At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was just
some encoding issue. Never knew I was missing out on smiles.

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bdcravens
I always assumed there was some piece of Internet wisdom I didn't that the "J"
represented.

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wernsey
Me too. I interpreted it as a smile, but just assumed it was some meme I
didn't know about (and couldn't be bothered to look up).

At least I never replied to anyone with an explicit J, as in "Thank you J"

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breakingcups
People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue. Microsoft wanted
to represent a real smiley in text without resorting to images. There was no
standard unicode character for such a smiley so Microsoft chose a font that
did support the smiley character.

Of course hindsight is 20-20, it's easy to say now they should've gone with a
character that wasn't in use yet, but circumstances being what they were, a
bug is not a completely correct description for what this behavior is.

~~~
zamalek
> People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue

Furthermore, it's just a configuration issue. You can change it (it's in the
autocorrection settings).

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smackfu
Can you change it as the receiver who sees the J?

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bruno2223
6 years of this bug, and now they're fixing.

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combatentropy
Microsoft is run by salesmen. Code that yields bullet points on a box takes
priority. Code that just smoothes things out for the user is considered a
pointless threat to the bottom line and is therefore deferred indefinitely.

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r00fus
Microsoft Outlook on the Mac (specifically meeting invites) has borked bullet
lists repeatedly for me.

Of course, in this case, it's "not Windows" so it must suck worse than the
Windows version.

~~~
princekolt
Funny thing is that Excel came out for the Mac first in 1985, and was so
popular that they made a version for Windows 2 years later.

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dhruvb14
I wish they would fix thread locks when syncing exchange accounts with slow
internet. Been able to reproduce it super easily and recorded it on video but
no output in system logs.

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thr0waway1239
Triage report: "Non-critical (P25). No need to worry as this only affects a
really small minority of our users. In our user surveys, we found out that too
few people are actually happy when they are inside Microsoft Outlook."

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douche
You know what bug/feature I would dearly like fixed? When I hover over a from
or reply-all address that is rendering as a display name, e.g. "John Smith", I
would like for Outlook to show what the raw email address is in the card that
comes up, without having to expand it out into the ginormous full contact
card.

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cesarb
Raymond Chen commented on this, back in 2006:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103)

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mrmondo
Would be interested to hear a public PIR on what excuse they make up for this
taking them 6+ years to fix on such a widespread bug.

