
Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003) - ted0
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html
======
gaving
"I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming mail and separates out
anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently."

Ding ding ding.

~~~
sarreph
Oh, I have a secretary like that too; she's called _The New Gmail_

~~~
cowsandmilk
ha, the new gmail constantly puts e-mails from my customers into
"Promotions"...

~~~
tghw
I'm confused by this response, and I've seen it often. You don't have to use
this feature of Gmail. It can easily be reverted back to default email
behavior. So I'm perplexed when people complain about it not working very
well, and from everything I've heard, few people actually do think it works
well...

~~~
ZoF
I think it works pretty damn amazingly.

------
yeukhon
Interestingly, this is still a style choice.

Just a few more to consider:

* webpage vs web page

* website vs web site

* lifestyle vs life style

* Asian-American vs Asian American

* e-commerce vs ecommerce

* cannot vs can not

* real-time vs real time (as one of the comments in this thread).

[http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/e-mail-
or...](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/e-mail-or-email)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-
hyphen-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-hyphen-
idUSHAR15384620070921)

[http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-
aword-20100901,...](http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-
aword-20100901,0,121602.story)

My English teacher tells us that we change grammar as we progress as a
society. Articles from the 1700s will be different from the one from 1800s,
1900s and 2000s.

Also, writing style and grammar are also regional and industry dependent.

Some note from Oxford dictionary
([http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/10/hyphens-in-the-
he...](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/10/hyphens-in-the-headlines/))

> Let’s just step back from the hyperbole: how do dictionary-makers decide
> whether noun compounds should be hyphenated or not? It’s not an arbitrary
> choice: for our current English dictionaries, such as the free one on this
> website, Oxford’s lexicographers assiduously check the evidence of billions
> of words of today’s English on a huge database, the Oxford English Corpus.
> If they see that in the vast majority of cases, a noun such as ice cream is
> written as an unhyphenated two-word form, then this is the spelling they
> will select to appear in the dictionary.

~~~
lstamour
Don't forget realtime ;-) I suppose that could be clarified to "realtimes".

That said, I never wrote "E-mail" with a hyphen, though I still can't stop
myself from capitalizing Internets.

~~~
yeukhon
There is a difference between Internet and internet when we refer to the
Internet as we know it today. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology)
but yeah :3

------
rdl
I just use "mail". email vs. postal mail or physical mail when it needs
further disambiguation.

~~~
eberfreitas
The problem with that is that "email" is an actual word in other languages. In
Portuguese, "email" is email, but "mail" means nothing so I guess "email" is a
better "global" option...

~~~
Xylakant
In German "Email" means enamel, so the blessed spelling is E-Mail.

~~~
ansimionescu
Same in Romanian (and probably many other European languages), but it's never
confusing due to the huge difference in usage frequency, context, and
obviously different pronunciation.

------
dsirijus
I have switched from basically real-time email push correspondence to manual
fetch every day or two. Basically, when I feel like it. My mail traffic has
dropped from ~50 to 1 to 2 a day.

It's hard to say whether it benefited me or not, but I'm sure of one thing - I
don't waste time on email anymore.

~~~
my_username_is_
Does anyone know if its possible to hack GMail such that it only updates your
inbox at certain times? I've fallen into a habit of checking it more often
than I should (on a computer, both work and personal) and it would certainly
help me if the inbox just didn't update with new mail continuously.

~~~
larrys
"Does anyone know if its possible to hack GMail such that it only updates your
inbox at certain times? I've fallen into a habit of checking it more often
than I should (on a computer, both work and personal) and it would certainly
help me if the inbox just didn't update with new mail continuously."

Not by hacking email, but there should be a way to do that using the
following.

enable imap in gmail (pull email from the gmail box every "x" hours).

That email goes into a different box, the one you check whenever you want but
it's only updated every "x" hours. So you would quickly realize there is no
point in checking that box.

Other ways might include setting up a vps that receives the email but delaying
the forwarding to gmail until a specified time. So the vps setup email (using
sendmail or whatever) simply holds and forwards to gmail every "x" hours.

I'd have to think this through but there is definitely a way using various
unix tools, smtp, cron, imap to do something like this. (Probably many ways
for sure).

So in other words you are either grabbing from gmail to another mail host
every "x" hours (and then possibly forwarding to another gmail box) or you are
sending all mail to another mail host (and then sending it to gmail).

If you don't need gmail in particular there are probably a few ways to do this
with shell scripting and knowledge of smtp, imap, cron etc.

------
kremlin
Anybody else prefer 'non-zero' to 'nonzero'?

------
drawkbox
But people still speak with it in there, great quote btw:

'I don't even have an _e-mail_ address. I have reached an age where my main
purpose is not to receive messages.' \--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New
Yorker

~~~
ChrisClark
By that, do you mean people pronounce it e-mail, with a long e? Because we
have words like emu, evoke, even, elongate, and others. We don't necessarily
need a dash to pronounce a long e.

If that's not what you meant, carry on. ;)

------
ohwp
Startup opportunity: Secretary, a service that reads your incoming e-mail and
holds unimportant e-mail to release it to your inbox every 3 months...

~~~
nielsbjerg
And when the machine learning algorithm gets it wrong after lots of right
predictions, you find out that someone forgot to renew your domain the hard
way. Even googles tabbed inbox makes me miss things, since glancing at the
main inbox revealed nothing of importance.. It's not for me at least.

~~~
welterde
> you find out that someone forgot to renew your domain the hard way

Is that really still a thing?

Keeping the bank account used for direct debit for the domains above zero
should not be _that_ hard I would assume.

------
catshirt
Drop the "E". Just "Mail". It's cleaner.

------
dkoch
The AP Stylebook switched from e-mail to email a few years back.

------
eddieroger
It's off topic, but I think it's funny that he equates email with immediacy.
We choose to treat it as such, but some of us don't. One of the few habits I
kept from GTD was disabling email alerts, and my life is significantly less
stressful at work because of it. It took a little bit for my coworkers to
grok, but they prefer I get stuff done, and respect the fact that I can't if
I'm continually interrupted. I parse my at regular intervals during the day,
but only when I'm completed with a period of focus. I may not take long hours
of "studying and uninterruptible concentration," but being a developer does
require periods of focus that email can disrupt.

On topic - I haven't called it "e-mail" since the 90s, and usually just call
it 'mail.'

------
alayne
The New York times finally switched to email last year after holding on to the
outdated hyphenated version.

------
Reallynow
Eddie: Is it hyphenated? Chief Wiggum: It used to be. Back in the bad old
days. Of course every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. Then there's
N'Sync. Heh. What the hell is that. Jump in any time, Eddie, these are good
topics.

~~~
neur0mancer
My upvote, sir. HN needs more Simpsons' quotes.

~~~
Blahah
They only come out at night. Or, in this case, during the daytime.

------
tzs
I like the term "the Electromail" as used by The Watley Review [1].

[1] [http://www.watleyreview.com](http://www.watleyreview.com)

------
shittyanalogy
The great thing about language is you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Everyone chooses their own communication strategy based on experience and
personal preference. Wanna write _e-mail_? do it. Wanna write _email_? do it.

There will never be a canonical English. Talk the way you want to and the way
that is most effective for you, not the way people tell you to.

------
drdeadringer
Somewhere along the line, I failed to realize that some people still use the
hyphen in eMail.

------
dolzenko
"Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the
Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different
reason." \- what he is on about there?

~~~
div
Email is the French / German / Dutch word for enamel.

Of course the pronounciation is very different.

~~~
kourt
Thanks. The French linguistic equivalent is the shortening of "courrier
électronique" to "courriel".

~~~
bbanyc
They missed a chance to abbreviate "poste électronique" to "postel", which
would also commemorate the creator of SMTP.

------
x13
i've been sending him messages for years, depositing small amounts into his
checking account representing ASCII characters. granted, it takes some time.
this ought to get you started:

$0.48 = H $0.49 = I

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Knuth-
che...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Knuth-check2.png)

------
Urgo
What I'd love to see is dropping the www.

------
simplexion
Massive douche.

~~~
nicky0
I love that you just called Donald Knuth a massive douche. That is all.

~~~
jakobe
Kids, these days.

