Hi Friend,
When composing email, you probably just type and type without using a hard carriage return until the end of a paragraph. It looks fine when you're finished because your email program automatically wraps the words in a nice legible format on your screen. This word wrap is usually done based on a line length of anywhere from 70 to 80 characters.
Well, let's say I receive your message, but my email program
either doesn't have
the capability of automatically wrapping incoming messages OR
it wraps them
at 60 characters. Since you performed no hard "end of line"
carriage returns
when typing your message, my email software thinks it's one
long sentence and
will either make me scroll left and right to read it OR your
email will look
like this paragraph.
Pretty awful, right?
So how do you avoid this problem? When composing email messages, use a hard carriage return before you get to the end of each line. A maximum line length of 56 to 60 characters works just fine.
Now, this can be hard to do if you are constantly making changes in your emails before you send them. Instead, type the entire email and then go back through and break it up by inserting hard carriage returns. Also, word processors (Word, WordPerfect) count the characters in the status bar as you type, so you could use that software to compose or tidy up your emails. The extra advantage of the built-in spell-checker is nice too!
Another reason people encounter "funny looking" email messages is called proportional character fonts. Like I mentioned earlier, all email programs are different. Therefore the fonts used by each program varies widely. Basically, there are fixed pitch fonts like courier (found on Eudora and most web-based email) and there are proportional spaced fonts (like AOL and Compuserve email).
With fixed-pitch fonts, all characters in a paragraph will line up directly above each other. With a proportional-spaced font, CAPS, space bars and other keystrokes are wider. Although a sentence may show the same length as the one above it, it could have 10 or more extra characters, especially if there is more use of letters like l, i, and t, which take up less space.
If you create a message using one type of font and send it to an email recipient using the other, the message will not look the same when they receive it.
Once again, the solution is to use a hard carriage return (Enter) after 56-60 characters. If you follow that rule, you can keep these problems caused by the difference in email programs to a bare minimum. If you plan on sending the same message to multiple recipients, consider testing the message with a friend on another service.
The last thing you want is an email message with great content, being dismissed simply because it wasn't "good looking" enough!
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