7 ms·
Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003)
- gaving 13y ago"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.
- ted0 13y agoJealous.
- vacri 13y agoYeah, the take-home (takehome?) message in this essay is "have a meatspace spamfilter and things are peachy".
- sarreph 13y agoOh, I have a secretary like that too; she's called The New Gmail
- cowsandmilk 13y agoha, the new gmail constantly puts e-mails from my customers into "Promotions"...
- tghw 13y agoI'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 13y agoI think it works pretty damn amazingly.
- yrochat 13y agoD. E. Knuth would not agree: "(Encrypted messages that I get from "gmail.com" are also gibberish and unreadable without great pain.) Send PLAIN ASCII TEXT ONLY." http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
- rdl 13y agoI just use "mail". email vs. postal mail or physical mail when it needs further disambiguation.
- tudorw 13y agoAgreed, it would save a lot of keystrokes if we just call it mail :)
- eberfreitas 13y agoThe 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 13y agoIn German "Email" means enamel, so the blessed spelling is E-Mail.
- ansimionescu 13y agoSame 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.
- dkoch 13y agoThe AP Stylebook switched from e-mail to email a few years back.
- dsirijus 13y agoI 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_ 13y agoDoes 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.
- YokoZar 13y agoYou can get 90% of the way there if you turn off gmail notifications on your phone.
- plg 13y agoummm how about only navigating to your gmail page when you want to check mail?
- larrys 13y ago"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.
- drawkbox 13y agoBut 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
- SaberTail 13y agoThe New Yorker tends to hang on to hyphens far longer than the rest of the printed world. Those and diaereses. You'll still see things like "teen-ager" and "coördinate" among their pages. It's just part of their style.
- ChrisClark 13y agoBy 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. ;)
- simplexion 13y agoMassive douche.
- tzs 13y agoI like the term "the Electromail" as used by The Watley Review [1]. [1] http://www.watleyreview.com http://www.watleyreview.com
- Reallynow 13y agoEddie: 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 13y agoMy upvote, sir. HN needs more Simpsons' quotes.
- Blahah 13y agoThey only come out at night. Or, in this case, during the daytime.
- drdeadringer 13y agoSomewhere along the line, I failed to realize that some people still use the hyphen in eMail.
- ohwp 13y agoStartup 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 13y agoAnd 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 13y ago> 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.
- nielsbjerg 13y agoAnd 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.
- rbonvall 13y agoThat's not how most secretaries work, so that service should be called "Knuthian Secretary" :)
- kremlin 13y agoAnybody else prefer 'non-zero' to 'nonzero'?
- dolzenko 13y ago"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 13y agoEmail is the French / German / Dutch word for enamel. Of course the pronounciation is very different.
- kourt 13y agoThanks. The French linguistic equivalent is the shortening of "courrier électronique" to "courriel".
- danbruc 13y agoI am German and I did not know this, was only aware of the alternative form Emaille.
- dolzenko 13y agoIs that really it? Thought it might go deeper than that and I'm missing on some "cultural background" :)
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- yeukhon 13y agoInterestingly, 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-email http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/e-mail-or... http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-hyphen-idUSHAR15384620070921 http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-hyphen-... http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-aword-20100901,0,121602.story http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp-aword-20100901,... 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-headlines/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/10/hyphens-in-the-he...) > 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.
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- lstamour 13y agoDon'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 13y agoThere 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
- catshirt 13y agoDrop the "E". Just "Mail". It's cleaner.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoI can't read brown on yellow.
- eddieroger 13y agoIt'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.'
- Urgo 13y agoWhat I'd love to see is dropping the www.
- alayne 13y agoThe New York times finally switched to email last year after holding on to the outdated hyphenated version.
- shittyanalogy 13y agoThe 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.
- x13 13y agoi'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-check2.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Knuth-che...