a. Funny. I’ve seen this J many times as well, and after looking in ‘smiley listing’ places on the web, I decided that it somehow looks like a half-smiling-mouth. Still it didn’t make sense, but I thought it’s only me not seeing it. So thanks, now I know the truth J

b. I think that even gmail, kmail, etc – can’t add the Emoticon-picture if you’re watching plain-text mails. So as I see it, this IS a problem with no good solution, other than “find a similar ascii representation for each Emoticon”