Stop the wingdings-related smiley J problem from Outlook emails

Question

Using Outlook to insert a smiley-face in an email results in a plain text portion with a proper Unicode smiley, and an HTML portion with a Wingdings J-character smiley.
This renders as a J in Firefox.
I raised this issue with the Zimbra team.
Dear Outlook team: stop it. Make this stop happening. Turn it off. Make it cease to exist. Halt.
With utmost sincerity,
JL

Answer 1

For some inexplicable reason, somebody at Microsoft thought it wise to autocorrect “:)” as a truer smiley
when composing rich text documents and/or HTML email – rendering it in a specific font face (WingDings). This is why people think you’re crazy for injecting a random “J” in emails – they don’t have the same font(s) installed on their machine! And even if you
have WingDings installed, you may only still see a J where a smile should clearly be.
So, there’s a simple fix that’ll make your emails 100% more intelligible (as far as smiles are concerned). Delete the autocompletes.
Open Microsoft Outlook (if it’s not already open).
Fire up the Options panel (found under the File ribbon).
Click open the Mail tab. You should see a “Spelling and Autocorrect…” button. The “Editor Options” panel will launch.
From there, click the “AutoCorrect Options…” button. The “AutoCorrect: English (U.S.)” properties pane is what you should see next.
Under the default “AutoCorrect” tab, look to the “Replace text as you type” section.
Click the “Delete” button.
Repeat these steps for the other smiley autoreplacements.
Quoted from
http://chris.pirillo.com/j-smiley-outlook-email-problem-and-fix/