Add Spice to your Email Messages with Text Based Email Emotion Icons

The drawback of email is that, with text based communication, it is not possible to convey subtle shades of meaning that are normally communicated by body language and tonal voice cues.  Email emotion icons exist to fill this void. 

The first and still most commonly used of the email emotion icons is the simple smiley face.  Using a colon, a hyphen, and an open parenthesis, this most common of the email emotion icons indicates that the current statement should be considered tongue in cheek.

In addition to the basic smiley, as this class of email emotion icons has become known, other email emotion icons have been created that allow more sophisticated shades of meaning to be inserted into email messages.  By replacing the colon in the smiley face with a semicolon, the icon looks like a winking face and is used to convey sarcasm.  By replacing the open parenthesis with a straight line or closed parenthesis, it is possible to create email emotion icons that indicate skepticism or displeasure. 

Later email clients allow messages to be composed in hypertext markup language (HTML), the language of the World Wide Web.  This allows much more complicated images to stand in for email emotion icons.  With HTML email, it is not necessary to use the limited ASCII character set to convey emotion.  Email emotion icons can actually be imbedded as images.  However, since not everyone is able to receive HTML email, be sure that the recipient has an HTML enabled email client before sending this type of message.