Why does smiley turn into j

I raised this issue with the Zimbra team. Dear Outlook team: stop it. Make this stop happening. Turn it off. Make it cease to exist. With utmost sincerity, JL. Thursday, October 24, PM. Fire up the Options panel found under the File ribbon. Click open the Mail tab. Repeat these steps for the other smiley autoreplacements.

Sunday, October 27, PM. Sadly, this does me no good -- I don't use Outlook. This is why people think you're crazy for inserting random "J" characters in your emails — they don't have the same fonts installed on their machine! Actually, the missing font is Wingdings , the wacky images font that offered a bit of novelty for early Word users but is functionally kind of useless. The process in Outlook, for example, goes like this:.

We had to dig into the guts of a Word document to see how the new smiley face is being coded. Keep an eye on Microsoft Office. Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox. We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Therefore, when Microsoft Outlook users type smiley faces in an e-mail message, they are sent as visual smiley face icons. The smiley face icons show up correctly on most user's computers, since most Mac and Windows-based machines include the Wingdings font. Most modern e-mail programs also support formatted text, including custom fonts.

However, if you don't have the Wingdings font installed or your e-mail program or webmail interface does not support formatted text, the smiley face will show up as a "J". Also, if a message has been forwarded several times and one of the users in the forwarding chain could not view the smiley face correctly, it will be transmitted as a "J" to all future recipients.