Hot answers tagged email
68
Both e-mail and email are in standard use at this point, although e-mail retains a vast majority of usage in edited, published writing according to my research using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
Here are the current results counts in COCA for various categories of English:
e-mail email
spoken 3535 711
fiction ...
63
Back when typewriters were in common use and photocopiers were rare, one kind of paper you used to be able to buy actually came as two or more sheets stuck together at the top with carbon paper between each sheet. This way you automatically had multiple copies of whatever you put on the paper. This was commonly used to save typing work for office memos, but ...
56
It is a smiley:☺.
What does "J" mean in e-mail messages?
Answer: If you've ever received an e-mail with a mysterious "J" in the body of the message, you may have been perplexed by its meaning. Some messages have a single J, while others have several. Most J's appear at the end of sentences, but they can appear anywhere in the message So what does ...
46
Both are correct and common. I'd recommend the shorter and simpler email.
There seems to be a tendency to drop hyphen as a newly coined word becomes more and more commonplace:
electronic mail → e-mail → email
That is what I've read earlier somewhere, and looking around I now found at least this quote by Donald Knuth to support the claim:
Newly ...
32
Putting formal salutations and complimentary closes into an e-mail tends to make them very formal compared to most e-mails.
In my experience working in the software industry, people who always put them into ordinary business e-mails come off as unnecessarily formal. Often foreigners have been taught in English class to do this, and the result is that I ...
29
I think the first thing to say about this is that it’s always acceptable to avoid these abbreviations... even in the shortest, most intimate SMS or instant message, a fully-spelled-out you or are would never be seen as too formal.
That being said, if you are worried in the least that the person who you are corresponding with might think you are stupid, ...
22
I use a P.S. rather often in my emails, when the content of the P.S. is unrelated to the rest of the body of the message. For example, if I was writing two or three paragraphs about a database problem to a colleague, but I knew his wife had been recently released from the hospital, I might end the message with something like:
P.S. I hope your wife is ...
21
Something like this?
Dear Mr Jones,
I'm John Smith, a code monkey, and I work with Phillip in the IT pit.
He suggested that you might be able to help me hack into Accounts and
give myself a raise.
It would really help me in my new project - P0232 - Theft for Fun and Profit.
I'm free for the rest of the day because I'm pulling a sickie.
...
16
If you consider it to be a phrase that simply spans two lines, I'd say:
Thanks,
John Doe
is correct. Without the comma it would imply that you're thanking John Doe. It's certainly the one I use personally, not that that's a particularly good back-up for this answer. I can't say I've ever seen anyone use it with a ".", that just looks wrong to me.
16
According to Merriam-Webster,
e-mail[...]2 b: an e-mail message <sent him an e–mail>
Wiktionary agrees:
e-mail (countable and uncountable; plural e-mails)
[...]
2. (countable, see Usage notes below)A message sent via an e-mail system.
I am searching through my old e-mails. He sent me several e-mails last week to that effect.
The ...
16
Some sensitivity to age and formality is needed to answer this question. A formal note does not change in structure because it's being sent via email. There's nothing special or magical about email that gives one permission to be forward, rude, or insulting.
When writing to older persons, persons in authority, superiors, et al, I recommend a salutation and ...
15
"Yours sincerely" and "Yours faithfully" now sound somewhat formal and I'd advise against them unless your email is otherwise official or formal in nature.
"Best regards" (or just "Br") is, in my experience, extremely common in business emails, and a safe choice for many situations. "Best wishes," is also a common alternative that falls into this category.
...
13
I generally use "email".
I think people who work with technology use "email" and people who write about it use "e-mail" (though this isn't a standard).
Google, Yahoo and Apple use "email".
USAToday, CNN and the New York Times use "e-mail".
According to wikipedia:
There are several spelling variations that occasionally prove cause for surprisingly vehement ...
13
Personally I would avoid shortcuts like "u" or "r" in any business emails (and in personal ones too actually). Depending on the recipient, they might make you seem more adolescent or even, um, less smart than you actually are.
At best, such shortcuts have no effect on how the recipient perceives you or the message. But considering that you do not really ...
13
Business Email/Letter Closings:
Best Regards,
Cordially,
Enjoy,
Enthusiastically,
Good Wishes,
Many Thanks,
Most Sincerely,
Regards,
Sincerely,
Thank You,
With Confidence.
Informal Email/Letter Closings:
Adios,
Blessings,
Cheerio,
Cheers,
God Bless,
Gotta Boogie,
Grace and Peace,
Have Fun,
Health and Happiness,
Keep the Faith,
Later Vader,
Later ...
13
I'll tend to use "Best regards," for anything even semi-formal, including correspondence with people in a business context whom I don't know very well.
When I use to work at NEC, it was considered the way you must sign off your emails when dealing with any of the Tokyo managers or engineers, and so it kind of just stuck.
For less formal, it'll be "Thanks" ...
13
Most email applications will have a clear indication (e.g. a clip icon) when the email has attachments. So you don't really have to explain that. Instead, you can focus on describing what exactly is attached to the email. For example:
The attached file is the document that
you requested.
The attachment is a draft Power
Point presentation.
...
12
I use both "emails" and "email" in the following manner:
I need to check my email.
I sent you several emails, to which you have yet to respond.
My rationalization for #2 is that "emails" is short for "email messages". I would never, however, say "I need to check my emails," because in "I need to check my email," the word "email" is a collective ...
12
I don't believe it outdated, but very much reserved to:
business letter (where it is one of the common phrases: "I am writing to inquire about ...")
application letter ("I am writing to apply for the position of ...")
Some guide on writing style will advise you to:
Avoid stage directions.
Do not commence a letter by telling the recipient what you ...
11
For informal emails you could use:
I've attached...
For more formal emails you could write:
Please find attached...
For a discussion of enclosed vs attached please see:
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/22264-difference-between-enclosed-attached.html
11
It's kind of a carryover from my medievalist hobby, but I really like using
Greetings,
or even
Greetings!
for emails to a group of people. It's also really handy for addressing a single person when you're unsure of that person's gender and/or title.
11
If you don't know the recipients' names, I refer you to the other answers. However, if you do know their names, then I will add that I would actually just write:
Dear John,Dear Jack,
I have been using this formula for more than a decade. So far, nobody has complained. For me, this approach has quite a few advantages. First of all, it is more personal ...
11
Dear is a perfectly appropriate letter greeting in all circumstances. However you do need a noun to follow. "Dear, " on its own doesn't work.
The standard opening if you don't know enough about the reader is "Dear Sir/Madam,"
Note that when used to open a letter, dear is an adjective:
Dear Mr Smith,
Dear Susan,
Dear Sir/Madam,
Dear is also ...
10
To me, Dear all conveys laziness. A well-thought-out message should have a specific audience that the message applies to. Dear coworkers, Dear minions, Dear Death-Eaters, Dear residents, etc. is not that much more difficult to type. Then someone reading the message can more easily discern whether the message applies to them or not.
10
The New Oxford American Dictionary reports that the word is e-mail, but also email.
Wiktionary has a voice for e-mail where it's reported email as alternative spelling, and the following note:
The spellings e-mail and email are both in common use. The use of email is now more widespread, likely due to one less character and thus making it easier to ...
10
RFC 2822, "Internet Message Format" says,
When used in a reply, the field body MAY start with the string "Re: " (from the Latin "res", in the matter of) followed by the contents of the "Subject:" field body of the original message.
So that's the official answer. Note that this specifically links "Re" to a reply.
I do find the explanation for the ...
10
You seem to have answered your own question, but it's perhaps worth pointing out that in both email and conventional mail a postscript can be a consciously chosen device for drawing attention to what it contains. What might look like an afterthought to the reader might be a deliberate ploy by the writer.
9
Strictly speaking, "please" and "kindly" do serve separate purposes. I can demand that you kindly do a certain task:
Kindly apologize to your mother
The intent is to dictate how you should apologize. Prepending "please" is me politely asking you to do something:
Please apologize to your mother
Combining them signifies that I am being polite and ...
9
As a contractor I tend to just use:
Yours,
I like to think it implies their 'ownership' of me for that time.
The longer versions do feel too formal for e-mail, or too loaded with meaning.
Otherwise I use the ever popular:
Regards,
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
