so I was told I had to convert all whitespace to  

That is plain nonsense.   is a non-breaking space, not ordinary white space that is also used with cyrillic text.

it works fine, however whitespace is converted into this weird character: “3 â€

You clearly have an encoding problem. Show us the code sending the e-mail. Also show us the source of a mail that was generated by the code and shows the problem.

Alexander