Why do people keep putting a J on the end of their emails?

I thought this was really interesting. People keep sending me emails and at the end of the email there is the letter J. I had no idea why they did that or what it meant. One person said it is the way they write a smile at the end. Now why they picked a J I had no idea. But since they did it I thought OK, use the convention and write a J at the end of my emails to them.

As it turned out there was something more interesting happening. People are sending emails with the smiley face at the end of the message and some email clients convert the smiley face to a J.

For example in the email client (Outlook) I can insert the smiley face by selecting Insert -> Symbol and then selecting the smiley face from the characters presented. If I type :-) in Outlook this is automatically converted to a smiley. If I send the email to a person who has an Apple iPhone the smiley appears as a J.

What is then quite funny is because people see others sending them a J they like myself start adding a J to indicate a smiley and we start having a trend.

So next time you receive an email with a J at the end you won’t be confused. You’ll simply know the person is sending you a smiley. It may be a smiley or it may simply be a J. If you really want your smiley to appear as you send it, then you may have to resort to the less graphical smiley which uses the characters colon, dash and curved bracket :-)

If you’re using Outlook the character sequence will automatically convert to the smiley symbol so press Control+Z and undo the automatic substitution.

At last the mystery of the J has been solved.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au