First, let me complement you on your email design. I like the organization of the page and content.
I work in the Product Management team at Fellowship Technologies. F1’s Group Email employs the industry standard UTF-8 formatting. Wikipedia defines UTF-8 as:
UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.
UTF-8 was created to be a generally recognized format that would unambiguously and safely convey Unicode information between machines and across the Internet. To do that, they sought to remove nulls and endianism from the data stream. The most popular one — practically the only one used — is known as UTF-8.
A quick Google search of “hotmail, UTF-8” produces over a million hits of individuals and organizations expressing their frustration with hotmail not being current with industry standards. Microsoft is trying convert their Hotmail user base to Windows Live Mail, which does conform to UTF-8 standards.
To alleviate (or at least reduce) the weird or random characters in Hotmail, we (and other organizations) have encoded a sequence that escapes any ASCII character over 127. Once we added this escape sequence, the support tickets we received on unwanted characters in Group Email dropped significantly. We get a new ticket maybe once a month reporting something similar to what you describe.
OK, enough of the techno jargon and history.
One suggestion is that you include a "View web version of this message" link at the top of your email. The link can be automatically generated to a Web-hosted version by your email service provider or to a link to your Web site. I have read that organizations that employ this method see about .5% of their email recipients use this link to view their email, suggesting that about 1 in 200 recipients have formatting issues with their ISP’s email.
Thanks for providing you base html. I will have my peers review it to see if they can see an issue. I see that you do have a ticket open on this issue in you support system. I will call you after the Thanksgiving holiday and we can discuss offline.
Thanks,
Scott