Receiving special character in the email when sending email using phpMailer?

Question

Hi,

I am using phpMailer class to send the HTML email, but whenever I send the html email then at the receiving end we receive some special character (!) at random position.

We have set the charset as utf-8 and calling MsgHTML($body) to pass the body. Took an echo at the send function of phpMailer class where it is printing correctly but when looking at gmail or yahoo then we see some special characters.

MY Code

function qa_send_raw_email($charset, $fromemail, $fromname, $toemail, $toname, $subject, $body, $html, $smtp_active, $smtp_address, $smtp_port, $smtp_secure, $smtp_authenticate, $smtp_username, $smtp_password, $env=null)
{
    require_once 'php-mailer/class-phpmailer.php';

    $mailer=new PHPMailer();
    $mailer->CharSet=$charset;

    $mailer->From=$fromemail;
    $mailer->Sender=$fromemail;
    $mailer->FromName=$fromname;
    $mailer->AddAddress($toemail, $toname);
    $mailer->Subject=$subject;
    $mailer->Body=$body;

    if ($html)
        $mailer->IsHTML(true);

    if ($smtp_active) {
        $mailer->IsSMTP();
        $mailer->Host=$smtp_address;
        $mailer->Port=$smtp_port;

        if ($smtp_secure)
            $mailer->SMTPSecure=$smtp_secure;

        if ($smtp_authenticate) {
            $mailer->SMTPAuth=true;
            $mailer->Username=$smtp_username;
            $mailer->Password=$smtp_password;
        }
    }

    if ($env)
    {
        $mailer->SetFrom($fromemail, $fromname);
        $mailer->AddReplyTo($fromemail, $fromname);
    }

    return $mailer->Send();
}

Excepted Output

<p><strong>Test Data for php mailer.</strong><br\><br\>Thanks Madhu </p>

Current Output

<p><strong>Tes!t Data for php mailer.</strong><br\><br\>Thank!s Madh!u <! /p>

Any pointers.

Thanks,