Weird characters in emails

A reader let me know that the blog-post announcement emails include strange characters; he forwarded the email that he received for a recent post:

<QUOTE>

Hello Confirmed Public Subscriber,

We have published new blog i= n our website. I broke the link for yesterday’s post
A friend = pointed out that the email announcement about yesterday’s post (which= was about the use of em-dashes and par­en­the­ses in contra= cts) in­clu­ded a busted link to the post. I tracked down th= e cause, which was that I’d added invisible hyphens to the title of t= he post for a nicer-looking right …
You may view the latest post= at http://www.oncontracts.com/screwed-up-link/
You received this e= -mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted.

<= p>Thanks & Regards
Admin

</QUOTE>

I use an off-the-shelf template: “New post published {{POSTTITLE}}”