Dear Miss Snark:
I've sent out a bunch of e-mail queries and noticed when I received some answers (and my query shows up at the end of the responses) that sometimes my letter looked strange on the other end. I copy and pasted my query from a Microsoft word document into the body of the e-mails and some of them apparently look like I wrote it in a foreign tongue. My apostrophes have been replaced by Russian looking letters. The columns and everything look out of whack. Other replies show that my query looked fine, just as I had sent it from my end. It looks normal from my "sent" column and it also looked fine when I sent a test run on some of my friends' computers. What's going on? Am I doing something wrong? Are these agents seeing Russian letters instead of my apostrophes? Thanks.
Yup, they are, in some cases.
I have one colleague who reliably sees weirdness in my emails so I have prevailed upon her to be my "reader". All she has to do when I send her a practice/draft email is hit reply when I send it to her for testing (her email program prints the text of my email at the bottom).
That way I get back what the finicky computers see, and I can fix it. It usually takes three or four "send/reply" cycles to get all the problems fixed.
The trick is to find the one friend who will see it like that, and bribe her into helping you.
There are other tricks to employ here too, and I'm sure some of the comments will give you some additional good ideas.
The good news is, most of us are pretty used to seeing that. It's annoying, but it's not a deal breaker. You DO want to fix it though cause it's really hard to read.