This particular instance may have been pasted in from an Outlook email. However it also appears in messages typed in manually. Here's more examples from a discussion thread.
I turned off all the filters and have the same results.
Here's a snippet of what shows in my "View source" of the html from IE6 of the first example. (You can see some artifacts from M$ auto html coding in the <font> definitions that enclose nothing.):
<font face="Comic Sans MS"><em><span class="098260913-23042004"></span></em></font><div><img height="104" alt="Monarch Buterfly" hspace="0" src="http://classes.lco-college.edu/moodle/file.php/1/monarch.gif" width="188" align="right" border="0" />Here's a message from <strong>Mary Ellen Ryall</strong>, a former student of our Woodlands Wisdom Project, here at LCOOCC. Anna Merritt sent out the story she was writing about the Plight of the Monarch Butterfly...well, there's been some good news.<br />
This shows up as:
Here's a message from Mary Ellen Ryall, a former student of our Woodlands Wisdom Project, here at LCOOCC. Anna Merritt sent out the story she was writing about the Plight of the Monarch Butterfly...well, there's been some good news.
Right after the word "message" is the first (A circumflex) in this example. I don't see anything in the html body that would cause this.