I bet the sender uses MS Outlook, and contrary to all the relevant specifications, Microsoft use non-approved fonts such as Webdings for some graphics.

Those of my colleagues who seem to think I need a picture of a phone or a wastebin tend to have stray letters in their signatures too.

I would still like to know if comments I get are meant to be ironic or serious. Those stupid emoticons often give a twist to the text and I don't want to be the one that always asks "What did you mean by that?" Can't I install a plug-in that makes up for the mistakes someone else makes in MS Outlook, like I did with the winmail.dat-problem ?

Outlook puts the smiley in as character 'J' in the Wingdings font.

There is an addon you could try:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/smiley-fixer/

Smiley-fixer works. Thanks a lot Toad-Hall and Zenos. SintFiacre out.

Good find, Toad, but I still get nonsense like this (attached).

There aren't equivalent UTF-8 characters for all of the Wingdings symbols. :-(

Trouble is, those who use only MS products don't know any different and can't seem to comprehend that their own usage is not standards-compliant, and will blame you for being incompatible.

Try telling them about ;-) and :-( and they'll say "But I have real pictures". Yeah, right.

I did find this link which has more info: http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html