Question: The way to torment us all--formatting

I always work under the assumption that an agent has a different e-mail server from my own and that formatted e-mails will always turn out wonky.  Hence, I always send plain text e-mails with block paragraphs, no indentation, and a line between each paragraph.  First question: is this the best method?

No. Here's what that looks like:

There's two kinds of people in the world, and Johnny's not either one of them"
Failed salesman Johnny Wolfe encounters a dying dog in the street while walking to work one morning,
the first dog he's seen in years--years since the suburbs were declared off limits, and people forced
back to the city. Johnny suspects there’s a sense of the wild returning to the city. 
When the dog kills one of Johnny’s rival salesmen, his suspicions are confirmed.  
WOLF traces two days in the life of Johnny Wolfe, a man mired in loss – the
loss of his childhood pet, the failure of his marriage, and the end of a once prosperous career
selling surveillance and security equipment. 
He yearns to get his life back on track, and when he finds a $1.2million sales order on his
colleague’s now dead body, he figures this deal could be the answer.  
Except what is the product that is being sold?  Why doesn’t it show up in any of the company sales catalogs?
And what does this product have to do with the sudden return of dogs to the city?
Or are they really dogs, and why is it that the people in Johnny’s life all smell so much like they’re out to get him? 
WOLF is a boy and his dog story...as seen through a prism of Salvador Dali.
 

Two lines between paragraphs and you break up paragraphs into blocks of 3-4 sentences.  Like this:

 "There's two kinds of people in the world, and Johnny's not either one of them"

Failed salesman Johnny Wolfe encounters a dying dog in the street while walking to work one morning,
the first dog he's seen in years--years since the suburbs were declared off limits, and people forced
back to the city. Johnny suspects there’s a sense of the wild returning to the city.

When the dog kills one of Johnny’s rival salesmen, his suspicions are confirmed.

WOLF traces two days in the life of Johnny Wolfe, a man mired in loss – the
loss of his childhood pet, the failure of his marriage, and the end of a once prosperous career
selling surveillance and security equipment.

He yearns to get his life back on track, and when he finds a $1.2million sales order on his
colleague’s now dead body, he figures this deal could be the answer.

Except what is the product that is being sold?  Why doesn’t it show up in any of the company sales catalogs?  

And what does this product have to do with the sudden return of dogs to the city?
Or are they really dogs, and why is it that the people in Johnny’s life all smell so much like they’re out to get him?

WOLF is a boy and his dog story...as seen through a prism of Salvador Dali.

When the agent says "send thirty pages" I assume they mean "take thirty pages properly formatted per my submission guidelines and then convert them to block paragraphs so you can insert them into the e-mail."  I recently had an agent (admittedly kind of a lower-tier talent) send me a nastygram because the pages I submitted within the body of an e-mail were not formatted to industry standard.  

It means take 30 pages and paste them into the body of the email. You must keep the double spacing. Reading big blocks of text is nigh to impossible.

Am I shooting myself in the foot using block formatting?  

yes.

Are agents genuinely rolling their eyes and saying "Why didn't this guy send me a rich text e-mail?" or was the agent who told me that just being a jerk?  

Well, no, we're not rolling our eyes, we're just not reading as much of your query as you wish. When it's hard to read, it's hard to read.


This is the kind of thing that can driver authors insane, I know. Truthfully, if a query sounds interesting and the writing doesn't well and truly suck, I often copy and paste into a word .doc and hit "normal" for the page to format correctly. Then I read it.

I'm always looking for good projects. Weird formatting isn't going to get in my way.