I decided to change from a plain text to html. OOPS. I discovered that when a line is sent to an email client that is too long it breaks the line and inserts a ! (exclamation point). This doesn't happen when you edit the email on the screen.

Email is a finicky thing. Some clients, like AOL didn't used to split html and text content. If you sent a multi-mime mail with text/html and text/plain, AOL viewers would get both. pegasus email users would get weird hard wrapping or something.

I suggest using something like outlook or thunderbird, maybe even eudora or pine, to test this. I know for a fact, that you won't get that weird issue unless ..

a. you insert the ! yourself
b. a server inbetween is out to get you, doing it itself.