The fundamental mistake made in vast majority of online publications has to do with physical limitation of e-mail. At most, recipient of an email sees 10 lines of text on first screen of an email. If you don't get your message in first 10 lines: it won't get read.

Why then, do so many e-publishers expect us to scroll through three and more screens just to find what's "In This Issue?"

I'm not talking about content. The content in newsletters and e-zines listed below -- some of best on Internet -- tends to be consistently worth reading IF you have time to scroll through many screens to get to actual content. Asking a reader to scroll through more than one screen just to find out what you want to say is not unlike taking five minutes to introduce yourself every time you call your sister. Neither practice is necessary or makes sense.

Space wasters Between glitzy HTML mastheads, lengthy letters from publishers, boilerplate about privacy policies and just plain garbage prose, it's rare newsletter or e-zine that gives you a table of contents on first screen.

1. Pay attention to punctuation, spelling, grammar and capitals.

how ofen do yoo receeve e-mail ritten like this!!!!! Many e-mail messages contain poor spelling and grammar, incorrect use of capital letters and/or poor punctuation. Such messages looks amateurish and inevitably produce a poor impression of sender.

2. Read previous tip again.

Seriously. I can't overstate just how important it is to write well. The standard of contemporary writing is quite poor -- both on Internet and in general use. It's easy to find errors in most written sources. Stand out from crowd. Write well.

3. Your subject line should be descriptive.

Many people get dozens (or even hundreds) of e-mail messages per day, and with so much of it being spam (i.e. unsolicited sales messages), your message may be deleted unread if subject line makes it look unimportant or spamish. Another reason to make your subject clear is to help recipient find it later. Many people archive months -- or even years -- worth of e-mail. A clear subject line will make your message easier to find. 4. Use short paragraphs and leave lines between them.

On-screen text is harder to read than printed text due to its lower resolution. You can make things easier for your readers by using short, clearly separated paragraphs. You'll notice that all of paragraphs in this article are fairly short (typically, four or five lines) and are separated by blank lines for clarity. You might also care to indent text on first line of each paragraph.

5. Tidy up all those ">" characters.

When replying to a message (or forwarding it), most e-mail programs put a ">" character in front of each line of original text, like so: > This is text of original > message that you are replying to. Your reply goes here.