Outlook 2011 for Mac: 1) emails I send arrive right-aligned, 2) emails disappear after “sending”

Hi, 

I have a couple of issues with Outlook for Mac 2011 (latest updates applied, Font weeder done):

1) any emails I send look alright on my screen but arrive right-aligned at the recipient's end. Recipients are using Outlook 2010 for Windows. 

I can't adjust any settings on the Mac as everything looks OK before sending. Only once I receive replies do I see that my previous message was right-aligned.

Any ideas about this?

The second issue I have is that emails do "send" with the known whooshing sound, but then they disappear. Once I notice they are not in the "sent" folder and I check webmail, I can find them in "drafts" with an error message stating that the message could not be sent. Sometimes, people reply to those emails that had disappeared from Outlook and were never sent according to webmail. This happens intermittently.

I have started to bcc myself in to ensure I have a copy of the email and ensure it was actually sent. Is there a decent solution to this error as this is suboptimal and has caused severe issues, especially with important customer contact. 

Just to make it clear: outlook did never have connection issues at the time this error occurred, I was receiving emails reliably and there were no unusual issues with the exchange server (aside from the known ones that don't seem to impact on performance).