Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: In the 1990s, people are being more and more confronted with the rapid developments in the information and communication technology sector. Computers seem to be indispensable not only in professional areas of life, but also in educational and private contexts. The Internet, which started as a small network of students, academics, and researchers, has developed into a global network, linking millions of people in countries all over the world. This enormous increase in information flow which is facilitated by Internet services, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail (e-mail ) or Usenet news appears to have an influence on communication processes and on the way in which we use language. The fact that the new media are becoming more and more popular has also been realised by marketing specialists. Due to the large number of users and the enormous growth potential of the Internet, the sector of electronic commerce is booming. The formerly anti-commercial values of the original Internet community seem to have drastically changed. Today, electronic commerce is a rapidly growing area, and numerous companies are beginning to position themselves on the information superhighway in terms of providing hardware, software, information content or services. Because of the fact that the Internet presents a fundamentally different environment for marketing activities than traditional media, conventional marketing communications need to be transformed in order to meet the requirements of such an information-intensive medium. On the Internet, the search for and the acquisition of relevant information, for example, takes up a great deal of time, since there is no general index of all existing Internet sites and services. As a consequence, companies have to find other ways of drawing the users¿ attention to their offers. One means of achieving that goal might be the distribution of commercial e-mails. Commercial e-mails can be classified as a form of advertising, which is considered to be a type of persuasive discourse. Due to the fact that advertisers are supposed to be striving to alter behaviour, awareness, knowledge, and attitudes in a way that would be beneficial to them, advertising is informative only on the surface. Therefore, no more distinction between informative and persuasive advertising is made. Accordingly, commercial e-mails are expected to have a persuasive intent which is assumed to be mirrored in a number of [...]