What I really like is when you get random J's in emails from people.
Took me a while to figure out this is some kind of autoreplace thing in Outlook that switches out emoticons with characters from the wingdings font, and J is a smiley face.
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.
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.)
There's also a common sig about "Please think twice about printing this email" with a wingwings of a little tree. That turns into some plain character as well. Maybe G? I kept wondering why everyone was ending their emails with G.
I also wonder how much energy is collectively wasted sending that extra line in every email. It must add up to something from a storage, energy use, rendering, etc perspective. I wonder if it offsets any behavior changes that may help the environment by those who actually don't print. I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing.
For months I thought my girlfriend was signing her emails with her initial. It wasn’t until I saw her typing an email to a friend that I realised what was going on.
That's probably the worst possible fix. Why fix something that should not be there at all? MS broke comparability with other email clients by introducing such one-way conversion to graphics, a fix must be on their side.
Wow, I was wondering about that just yesterday. It seems to be common among realtors and mortgage company underlings - people that I don't normally have to deal with, but that are likely to use emoticons to end every paragraph.
It isn't fair to call them illiterate any more than it would be illiterate for me to not understand all the intricacies of real estate law. At some point, we as technologists gave them this communications tool without actually engaging with them in its proper use, and they learned the lowest common denominator etiquette.
When my teenage kids text me, I make sure that they use complete sentences. I'm a bit of a bastard that way, but hopefully they'll be better off later on in life.
It's one of the few potentially decent paying professions someone without a college degree can get into without insurmountable entry barriers, so perhaps you should go a bit easier on them.
College or not, anyone involved in deals involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars should not be writing emails that look like a text message written by a 12 year old. Perhaps I'm selecting the wrong measure of quality, but if a realtor were to send me an email punctuated by a plethora of smiley faces and three periods at the end of sentences, I would find another realtor. I say this based on experience, and the one that communicates with email that appears to be written by an adult turns out to be the one that doesn't annoy me by not listening and showing me houses I have no interest in.
It doesn't look to me like he's discriminating against realtors for not having gone to college; he's bashing them for actual demonstrated poor literacy, which is a lot harder to excuse than not going to college. (If you meant to instead make a more reasonable complaint about him painting with an overly-broad brush, you should have said so.)
I am a mortgage company underling and can confirm that almost everyone at my company, and the realtors we deal with, use tons of emoticons. I think it's the only way everyone manages to stay sane in this business.
Took me a while to figure out this is some kind of autoreplace thing in Outlook that switches out emoticons with characters from the wingdings font, and J is a smiley face.