Strange Emoji failure

Using iPhone 5s running iOS 8.1.3 (12B466).
Computer: Macbook Pro Retina running Yosemite (10.10.2) and Thunderbird 31.5.0

When I create an email (on my phone or computer) and insert emoji characters, everything looks fine when viewed from my phone or from my computer (using Thunderbird) or in gmail (via safari web browser - though the emojis look different). When I receive an email with emojis, they look just fine on all platforms. If I reply to an email from my mac and include emojis, everything looks fine....

However, if I reply to an email from my phone (any email, with or without emojis) and use emojis, the emojis look fine in the reply, but when in that reply is received, all of the emojis are messed up (though in a strange way). When the reply is viewed on my phone, I can see the emojis just fine in the mailbox view that shows a preview (just the start of each message). In thunderbird I don't see any preview of the message when in the mailbox list view. However, when the email is opened (on the phone or in Thunderbird) ALL emojis appear as those annoying question-mark-in-black-diamond symbols. Conversely, when viewing the reply in gmail in Safari browser, the emojis show up as question marks in the email preview in the mailbox view, but when the email is opened, the emojis are drawn as the actual pictures (though gmail has different versions of those pictures - I'm not worried about that).

Why is this happening?????? Could it be something that my university email server is doing to the message before it goes out?

I can't understand why the emoji should look fine in the preview, but not in the actual message. I mean, it's the same data that is being processed.

This is driving me crazy!!!

-J

You might want to google your problem and you'll discover that using emojis is not exactly universal.

For example, even older articles like this say:
Access and Use Emoji in Mac OS X | OSXDaily

"You’ll notice that not all third-party applications will accept or recognize Emoji characters, but all of the OS X compatible apps that come from Apple do and most apps updated for Lion & Mountain Lion and beyond should too.

If the app doesn’t support Emoji display, nothing will be shown, and similarly if an emoji icon is sent to a user who doesn’t have a Mac or iOS device that supports emoji, nothing will be shown for them either, at best it will be a boring old square box instead of the color icon. Keep that in mind if you’re sending messages or posting the emoticons to the web, since a lot of other people using older Macs and Windows machines won’t be able to see them the same way as you do. …"

I'm fully aware that emojis are not supported everywhere. But this is an app that does support emojis, and yet in some cases the emojis are not shown properly. Most bizarre is that on the very same input, the emoji can be shown correctly in the preview of the message, but not in the full view of the message. This certainly seems like a bug in the Mail app that should be fixed. I was kind of hoping that someone else might chime in that yes they see the same problem under the same circumstance or no, it works just fine for them under the same conditions - in which case, I might have more info to help me pinpoint and resolve the issue.

I should point out, if it was not clear, that I am using the standard mail app that comes with iOS on my iPhone (5s running iOS 8.1.3, which is currently the most recent).

strange emoji failure

Yes, jj5406, exactly what you have described with emojis, preview in mac Mail happens to me, too. The emojis show in the preview, but in the body of the message they are black vertically stretched hexagons with question marks in them on my iPhone 5; and they are black diamonds with question marks in them on the macbook Air with 10.9.5. this is all true of the Face emojis, but the Heart emoji is a red heart in the body of the message as well as in the preview ! The mystery continues........

Welcome to the forum.

It's not a mystery at all. The hexagon with the question mark is the way your system is showing that whatever character it received is NOT in the font options for that application, and so it cannot be displayed. As pm-r tried to tell jj5406, emojis do not have a standard that all applications use, so emojis are unreliable.