By: CampaignMonitor

This week, a rather obvious Hotmail quirk cropped up. By obvious, I mean that a garden-variety set of symbols like © ® and ™ are being replaced by      , or 19px x 19px ‘emoji’ GIF images. Apparently Hotmail thought this would be a fun way to spice up HTML email newsletters, when in fact, it’s an annoyance to designers, who don’t want to have tiny footer text broken up by a © character that’s the size of a fist.

Yes, the images are here to stay – there’s a new bit of JavaScript code in Hotmail which ensures that no symbol goes by unmolested.

To make matters worse, if you have img { display: block; } in your email design’s CSS code to prevent gaps in Gmail, each emoji will be followed by a line break (pictured).

Bringing emoji down to size

Thankfully, there’s a fix – resizing the images so they’re more in line with the surrounding text. After viewing a couple of the solutions being spun around, we took a crack at our own and found that adding the following CSS code to your stylesheet works a charm:

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