Add Spice to your Email Messages with
Text Based Email Emotion Icons
Email software has revolutionized the way
that humans communicate. By using email,
it is possible to compose and send a complete
letter and have it delivered instantly without
having to worry about postage.
It is also possible to broadcast your
message to many people at once.
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.