Formatting Question [Italics]

As long as you're consistent, it doesn't matter.

I believe it should still be underlined.

I've heard that consistency is the important part. I use italics and it hasn't come up as an issue in my querying/communicating with agents so far.

The agents and editors at the conferences I've attended have unanimously said they want italics.

Yes, I've heard that you should use italics as well. The days of underlining are over, apparently.

Italics

So today I found a new thing to panic about (as if I didn't have enough already).
I noticed how sometimes, italics aren't preserved when emailed. Do any of you have this problem, too? Unfortunately, there are a lot of italicized sentences in the sample pages that I send to agents, and if they weren't italicized, everything would fall into a pit of confusion.
So how should I work around this? An agent suggested underlining. Does that actually work? I thought bold/underline would also disappear like italics.

Sorry if this question has been asked somewhere else.

If you want your email to the agent to appear without any odd, unreadable symbols, you should be submitting your query letter and pages as plain text within the email. Yes, this means that the italicized words will appear as plain text. I had the same issue with my novel when I was querying.

What I did was, if the agent offered the option of querying by snail mail I did that (not the cheapest option, I know).

If the agent doesn't accept queries by snail mail you can email plain text and if you have an isolated word in a sentence that's italicized, you could mark it as italicized like _this_.

For an entire block of text that's italicized you're probably best to set this off on its own (double-space above and below so it's in its own paragraph).

Hope this helps.