Within the last decade, laser-plasma based accelerators have been able to deliver electron beams with Maxwellian energy distributions characterized by effective temperatures in the range of 1-20 MeV. Changing the interaction parameters, the electron beam quality was improved. Especially, matching the interaction length to the dephasing length was crucial to produce an extremely high quality electron beam with a quasimonoenergetic distribution at 170 MeV. The optimization of these distributions is presented, as well as comparisons with three-dimensional particle-in-cell code simulations. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.