Small icon: incoming vs outgoing

Question

Up to now we use the following ascii art to show the difference in our mail/ticket system:

--> means "incoming"
<-- means "outgoing"

But some users complain, that it is not immediately clear what this means.

But some how I don't like this. "i" like incoming ....

i>>
<<o

The icon (or ascii art) is used if there are several tickets/mails displayed in a table.

How could you display this short and easy to understand?

Update1: It is an intranet web frontend.

Update2: One place where we display incoming and outgoing mails in one place: mail threads. It should be clear which mails were sent and which were received.

Answer 1

This?

->[] 
[]-> 

>>[] 
[]>> 

Or this:

->[]  
<-[]   
 
>>[] 
<<[] 

If the system is UNICODE enabled there are many graphical symbols accessible:

→▢

←▢

The above variants are easy to be expressed graphically: some arrow + some box

Answer 2

"IN"

&

"OUT"

Same/fewer characters, instant understanding (assuming your users are native English speakers...if they're not then adding "i" and "o" won't help anyway).

Answer 3

Is this a GUI, or a command-line interface, or...? It would be nice to have more than ASCII at your disposal :) If it's impossible, these are some images I would consider for incoming/outgoing icons.

more icons... consider color coding them to add further clarity.

Finally, I'd consider creating two totally different places for managing incoming and outgoing tickets (ie, a regularly-monitored inbox for things that need your attention and a rarely-visited outbox to review your history). Clearly differentiating between the two is important--perhaps they are different enough to warrant their own views?