
That mysterious J in emails - domino
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/604741.aspx
======
mahmud
Ahhhhh

Back in the late 90s, I used to read comp.compilers heavily (I think I might
have read it all on deja, to is beginnings) and cc'ers had a habit of saying
something in their messages, then answering themselves in their signature,
worded as a quote by some "john". For example

    
    
      Hi, I am looking for a BLISS-16 compiler for DEC Alpha.
    
      - russ
      [I don't think there is a bliss-16 compiler for the alpha. -john]
    
    

I found the practice humorous and meta, so I started using it in email.

Years later, I discovered it was no ironic humor, but the messages where
actually edited by the moderator, John Levine, who signed his own changes. I
can recall at least two people who I have sent such "ironic" messages who
would have been quite confused by it, both of them famous compiler hackers and
cc readers. One of them was John Levine :-P

~~~
die_sekte
Cargo Cult humor.

------
Timothee
Interesting story, but I doubt that the "!!!!1!!11one!!" part is to make fun
of leet.

On the contrary, I'd say that this was to make fun of people who type in all
caps (using Shift). In their hurry to write a great all-caps comment, they
miss the Shift key once in a while, leaving a '1' behind instead of '!'. If
anything, this would be the "elite" group making fun of noobs who can't type
properly. Dusting in some "one" or "eleven" is just the next step in geeky
humor.

~~~
rue
1337 != actual elite.

~~~
trafficlight
I've got some LED fans that beg to differ.

------
alttab
Finally. What the hell. I thought I was out on some joke, or for some reason a
lot of people at my company ended their sentences with "J" like "JK" but were
lazy.

I do my work on a Mac and I use the default mail client. I figure those
sending me e-mails do so through outlook. I get this stray "J" all the time.

When I saw the title of this link it elated me because I was finally going to
figure out what the hell was going on.

~~~
nailer
What a horrible thing to do by Microsoft. either they're naive enough to think
people won't ever read email outside Windows, or, more likely, clever and
arrogant enough to deliberately degrade the experience for non Windows
recipients.

~~~
alanh
I also assumed Hotmail was intentionally degrading messages received in
(explicit) Unicode from gmail. My em and en dashes showed up in Hotmail as
oddly accented As, leaving Hotmail users to assume there was something wrong
with Gmail.

------
misterbwong
Here's a solution for those actually using Office and wanting the smiley to
degrade gracefully into a :) instead of a J

[http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-
and-...](http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-and-fix/)

------
Timothee
I learned early on that this was a degradation of a smiley face, but what
surprised me is when I'd see it in emails which had gone through only
Microsoft components: from Outlook to Outlook through Exchange, the J would
still sometimes show up.

One could have assumed this behavior would be consistent along the way.

------
benologist
I've always wondered what that was ... I get it on every email from one
person.

~~~
mahmud
It's a placeholder for missing thoughts. The person is using your inbox as a
drawer for their drafts.

------
snprbob86
It leaves traces as a webdings font tag, so it should be programmatically
detectable. I'd love it if Gmail implemented a fix for Microsoft's legacy bug.

~~~
mseebach
Why? Then they'd concede that Microsoft are the true kings of the internet,
and that their arbitrary application of undocumented ad-hoc protocols is
something the rest of the world should spend resources catching up to.

If they did, however, they should put a yellow notice-bar in there saying
"This messages contains non-standard extensions specific to Microsoft Office
users. It has been cleaned up to the best of our abilities."

------
lamnk
This is especially annoying if you are among the minority uses Gmail in your
company where everyone else uses Outlook.

------
aquarin
One mystery in my office finally solved. I was wondering too, WTH is this J
and the end of the emails I receive frequently from the management.

------
city41
You can tell this is the case by looking at the preview of the message in the
popup notification. There Outlook never uses wingdings so if a smiley is early
enough in the message you'll see a J in the preview but a smiley in the actual
message.

------
rquirk
I wrote a Thunderbird plugin a few months back that people may find useful to
hide this issue in received mail at least. It changes wingding J, L and a few
others to the unicode smiley, etc. <http://github.com/richq/smileyfixer>

It doesn't fix outgoing mails, so when you plain text reply to the original
author they'll get their "J" right back at them :-)

------
codejoust
Now I found the phantom character! Whenever I got an email from someone they'd
randomly have 'J' in it for me and a bunch of other people who received it (I
used thunderbird, and most everyone else I talked to use gmail). It's odd that
Microsoft didn't use an ascii/unicode special character or a embed image in
the email (alt-texting it).

------
Elepsis
Coincidentally, a standalone L is the equivalent of a frownie face: :(

------
Confusion
I still don't get it: why is that smiley face added there in the first place?
The mysterious J appears in emails from people that certainly wouldn't 'sign'
their email with a smiley face.

~~~
larsberg
Outlook auto-corrects a variety of smiley-type -- :) :-) etc. -- into the
aforementioned J.

~~~
kiiski
That still doesn't explain why it would be in a message from someone who
wouldn't use a smiley in the first place.

~~~
brown9-2
How do you know they didn't intend to enter a smiley face?

~~~
wnoise
Because he never gets smiley faces from them. Of course, he gets a suspicious
number of Js.

~~~
Confusion
Well, there have been people whose emails would consistently end in a J on a
single line. And these aren't people that would end their mails with a single
smiley on the last line. Some of them probably don't even know what a smiley
is.

~~~
confuzatron
...do their names start with 'J'?

J

------
rbanffy
Interesting. I never encountered it in my years of closer relationship with
Microsoft. Must have happened after 2000/2001.

------
kazuya
So J Allard (that Xbox guy) was actually Smiley Allard.

That gives quite a different impression.

------
SpaceHobo
I don't see what makes this so amusing.:wq!

