Then there's ads. We have to have rules to make it fair to everyone, but will people read and adhere to those rules? Nope! They'll spam us with ads too frequently, too large, illegal, wrong format ... Quite apart from 95% that are a total waste of time and space because they are all for same thing.

No wonder so many ezines that once offered free ads are now discontinuing this service. The time spent weeding chaff from wheat simply cannot be justified. We set up to help others and it's old story, "Give a hand and they'll take an arm".

It's selfish, counter-productive and foolish. No-one is that desperate to make a living that they can steam-roller over fellow humans in their way. Always be careful what you do to people on way up, because you never know -- you might meet them on way back down.

So how's this dooming your business?

Well, it should be obvious, but I'll point it out for those who need help; that if there is less free advertising available you'll either have to pay for all of it and go broke or you'll never get to promote your business at all and still go broke.

If ezine editors have to spend all their time on admin, they'll never have time or space left for useful content and you'll never learn anything -- that is presuming you bother to read in first place? If you think you know it all, very likely you have most to learn.

If you use autoresponder addresses, free addresses or any other of nasties I've described, you've already labeled yourself as uncaring and unprofessional. You've doomed your business right off, no-one will deal with you. Many editors are now banning those addresses, so you won't get their value and assistance anyway. At end of day, you've only robbed yourself.

Well, it has to stop. Quite apart from what I have mentioned above, various services on net are having to tighten up rules and policies in a response to level of abuse. If you don't do your part in stemming it, by acting responsibly and not allowing others to get away with it, then commerce on Internet will be effectively outlawed and your business will be doomed. Take heed.

If, for instance, you have pasted in some text that was previously formatted at more than your set number of characters, it will then instantly show up "funny" breaks, which you can manually correct, or it will automatically format new text you type.

2. Also, and this may seem obvious, but you MUST save document in TextPad first to *fix* in breaks, before you copy and paste text to either your email program or your online message posting box for your ezine distribution.

Saving adds necessary, but invisible to you, code for hard line breaks. If you do not save your work first, it will look right to you in TextPad, but will not be right when it is sent by email.

Happy Formatting!

Ezine Assistant is a program you can use as an alternative, if you really cant get along with TextPad. That also has facilities for setting line breaks. You can grab a copy from: http:/ ucats.virtualave.net/eza2_0.exe

There is also an online formatting facility: FormatIt: http://www.jbmckee.com/formatit/index.html

For a great online tutorial on formatting, which also has screenshots on how to use TextPad: http://www.marketing-seek.com/hop/format.shtml