About e-mail

E-mail is becoming very popular way of communication - and that's great! Unfortunately many people create letters which contents leaves much to be desired - and I don't mean the things they write about, 'cause the text is not about this, but purely technical affairs.

Affair one - polish letters... I personally think they should not be used at all - many (very good) mailers can't do anything with them. But if you wish to write 100% Polish, you should not forget about this:

First of all use ISO-8859-2, not pseudostandards like Windows CP 1250.
Inform those programs that can benefit it about the fact you use them. So if you send a letter with polish national characters use a mailer that sets proper MIME header (mail without MIME disallows use of national characters) - there must be info thet the charset is iso-8859-2, and not iso-8859-1.
And be cultural - if someone doesn't want mail with national characters - don't use them.

Affair two is the length of lines... Remember not to send letters with more than 80 characters in a line (preferably leave few more characters as a margin). Letter with folding lines (not so bad anyway) or even lines disappearing somewhere beyond the right edge of a screen is completely unreadable.
Affair three is quoting... Of course you should quote the letter you reply to, but not the whole letter! In particular you should not quote the quotes from the even earlier letters (unless some parts are really indispensable, but that's rare), signatures, and pieces you don't reply to. And absolutely don't do tricks like quoting entire letter at the beginning or end of a letter.
Affair four are new "inventions" like Netscape... Not speaking about questionable sense and questionable convenience of using Netscape as a mailer (not my business anyway) - do not send letters in text/html format - letter should be written as a plain text (text/plain) - leave HTML for WWW...
Affair five... Absolutely don't send mail as eg. MS Word document... Such letter is completely unreadable... For at least 90% people...
Affair six are attachments... If you use them, be very careful - they are few formats they can be sent in and misteriously tend to be nonportable between mailers. Also not every mailer can do anything about themat all...
Affair seven - as we're ending - are signatures... Signature is a very useful piece of text - but please observe the unwritten rule of not making them longer than 4 lines...