Have you ever received an email from someone with a capital letter “J” at the end of it?  I don’t know if this happens much outside of the Affiliate industry, but I have received a ton of them.  I couldn’t figure out what it meant, so I looked into the issue.

Here is the J in an actual email I got

Apparently, it is caused by people that type a smiley face “:)” into their email while using Microsoft Outlook.  Outlook tries to make it look like a real smiley face by replacing it with “J” character in the Wingdings font, which is a smiley face.  The problem is, that only works if the recipient is using Outlook or another desktop email client that can read the Webdings font.

If you are primarily using Gmail like I do, then you will only see the “J” in a default font like Times New Roman.  So, just in case any of you have ever seen this “J”, now you know what it means.  Heck, maybe it will catch on and people will just start typing “J” instead of “:)” on purpose.

Or not.