[Now Fixed] Email Issue: © Copyright symbol breaking in Hotmail

Update - 26 April 2012

As mentioned by Brian Thies in the comments below, Hotmail have now released an update to their platform that fixes this bug, therefore designers don't need to take any action to update their code. We've run a few tests through Hotmail and the symbols are now being displayed as normal.

hotmail-copyright

We've noticed a peculiar rendering issue that's just appeared in Hotmail - the © ASCII code used to insert a copyright symbol loses all formatting. We've run some tests in various live browsers, and the issue seems to appear in IE, Firefox and Chrome/Safari. It appears that the symbols are actually being replaced by Hotmail's own emoji images, for example:  .The bug affects other symbols, including ® (®), ™ (™) ♠ (♠), ♣ (♣), ♦ (♦) and ♥ (♥).There are a few ways to stop this from happening:

• Use images instead of symbols

• Use the word "copyright" or (c) instead of the symbols

There is also a code fix that can be used, by adding the following style tag to theof your code:

<style>/* Hotmail symbol fix */.symbolfix img{width:10px !important;height:10px !important;}</style>

And then wrapping the symbols with the following span tag:

<span class="symbolfix">©</span>

This will resize Hotmail's icons so they're more in line with the font size, though unfortunately we still can't change the colour or style of the symbols.Hat tip to Matt Byrd and Josh Green on the fixes.Spotted by Sharon Jennings

Anyone know why Hotmail has suddenly started making a copyright symbol (©) larger than other text? #emailmarketing— Sharon Jennings (@SVJennings) April 17, 2012