Teaching at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences there is a
heavy focus on business English and, of course, e-mail writing.
Across the internet, there is a range of spellings for e-mail,
but I will argue, till I’m blue in the face, that it must be
spelled with a hyphen: e-mail. When e-mail started out it was
written with a capital, now you just look old-fashioned if you
use a capital for it (and a bit daft, after all, you don’t use a
capital ‘L’ for ‘letter’, do you?!). Reuters says that e-mail
should be ‘email’, without a hyphen, but what happens when we
talk of ebanking, ecommerce, eentertainment, egreeting?
According to Reuters, these should all have a hyphen (becoming
e-banking, e-commerce and, thankfully, e-entertainment,
e-greeting). So why should e-mail be different? If we have a
rule, surely it’s easier to apply it to all the words that are
likely to need it, than to select one that should break the
rule. OED, in its benevolence, says that you can use either, but
email, without the hyphen, is the d