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.
I'm called James so when I got a "Thanks J", I thought they had taken it on themselves to give me a new nickname. Perhaps signing off my emails with "Thanks :)" gave them sane impression.
Strangely felt better when I realised it was a smiley face.
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.
Wondering what could've been fixed instead.. 6 years ago emoji symbols weren't as predominant as today, I guess it's more of a marketing bug-fix, indeed.
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.
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.
How about you just leave it alone and let :) render as :) ? Microsoft and Outlook have a long history with lacking interoperability. Outlook Rich Text format. Outlook Rich Text handling of attachments. Lack of read/write CalDav and CardDav support. Outlook support for IMAP is meh.
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."
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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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadAt least I never replied to anyone with an explicit J, as in "Thank you J"
Strangely felt better when I realised it was a smiley face.
Of course, in this case, it's "not Windows" so it must suck worse than the Windows version.
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.
Furthermore, it's just a configuration issue. You can change it (it's in the autocorrection settings).
And by the way this is especially messed up if you use a screen reader.