Closed Bug 53153 Opened 25 years ago Closed 9 years ago

Decide on spelling: "e-mail" or "email"

Categories

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, defect, P3)

Product:
Core Graveyard
Component:
Tracking
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: jruderman, Assigned: neil)

Details

(Keywords: polish)

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/search?string=e-mail http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/search?string=email Note that most lxr hits for "e-mail" are in fact "message-mail", and most of the hits for "email" are just variable names, which often can't contain hyphens, and which are not generally seen by the end user. I like "e-mail" better, but "email" seems to be winning. I'll let you guys flame it out. See also bug 37923.
I am not clear on the bug being filed here. Are you saying that our UI has e-mail and email both used in menus and dialogs?
There are actually fewer uses of "e-mail" than I thought: - The "interview" and "understanding privacy" pages from the "privacy and security" submenu of the "tasks" menu. - A console warning at http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/prefs/resources/content/is pUtils.js#95 Since the branch has already occurred and since there are so few uses of "e- mail" visible to the user, feel free to turn this bug into a (wontfix?) bug for making Mozilla 0.9/Netscape 6.0 use "email" consistently if you think that is appropriate. I'll file another bug for Mozilla 1.0 or Netscape 6.1 to use the standard spelling in that case.
There was a slashdot article about this a few days ago. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/23/1255205&mode=thread
American Heritage Dictionary 4th ed. prefers "e-mail" with email and E-mail as accepted variants. http://www.bartleby.com/61/98/E0099800.html I personally prefer "e-mail" (after all, the horizontal thing is the "x-axis," not the "xaxis").
Knuth makes a case for dropping the hyphen: http://www-cs-staff.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/email.html
I don't find Knuth's "nonzero" argument very convincing, but he is right that "email" seems to have gained more traction in Britain. The OED's entry is "email, also e-mail"; I don't know whether that means it prefers the nonhyphenated form or finds both forms equally acceptable. Mozilla should also be consistent on whether the E should be capitalized: E-mail/Email or e-mail/email. Mozilla is currently using "Email" in the hyperlinks in the 3-pane window: "Read my Email messages."
Merriam-Webster defines `e-mail', and doesn't even mention `email' as a variant spelling. Microsoft use `e-mail' everywhere that I can see. Apple use `email' in their help docs, but `e-mail' throughout the Mac OS GUI itself. Eudora uses `email'; Hotmail uses `e-mail'. 4.x, and Yahoo Mail, use just `mail'. And this last variant, I think, is the key. Knuth is correct that English words tend to lose their hyphens over time -- we now write `today' instead of `to-day', for example. And omitting the hyphen would save characters, in the short term. But in the long term, when the electronic forms of things are the norm rather than the exception, we would save even more characters if we just referred to `mail' (and `commerce', and `business', etc) rather than `email' (and `ecommerce', and `ebusiness', etc). That would be much more likely to happen if we retained the hyphen now, since dropping a hyphen-marked prefix from a word is a whole lot easier than dropping a single letter (witness all the unwanted single letters that, after hundreds of years, still hang around words like `knife' and `light'). For that reason (and because `email' makes me cringe:-), I recommend `e-mail'. As for capitalization, `e-mail' should not have a capital `E'. Unlike Singapore, the Spice Girls, Henri Sivonen, the Web, and Mozilla, `e-mail' is not a proper name for a particular entity; it is a general term describing a type of system or message, and a number of e-mail systems are in existence.
Chaning the qa contact on these bugs to me. MPT will be moving to the owner of this component shortly. I would like to thank him for all his hard work as he moves roles in mozilla.org...Yada, Yada, Yada...
QA Contact: mpt → zach
updating to new owner. sorry for the spam.
Assignee: hangas → mpt
Has there been any decision on this? These regexp-based searches should filter out occurences of strings like "message-mail" and "movemail": http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/search?string=%5B%5Ea-z%5Demail&regexp=on http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/search?string=%5B%5Ea-z%5De-mail&regexp=on
I'd vote for email as well; I rarely see anyone write it in day-to-day use with the hyphen.
"mail" where possible is good, but when necessary, I prefer "email" over "e-mail".
When our internal style guide was written, we adopted the same style developed by Wired magazine's editors, which called for using "email". I checked with our editor on this issue and she offered the following: >The Netscape style guide was probably written at a time when Wired Style >dictated "email" and encouraged closing may newly created words--maybe they >considered hyphen usage passé. Last year, however, even the pundits at Wired >have changed their minds and have inserted the hyphen once again. >(http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39450,00.html) . Microsoft Style also >dictates "e-mail." >I prefer "e-mail." It's clear that the hyphenated e retains the original meaning >of the term, electronic mail. After a busy thread among members of the Bay Area >Editors' Forum last year, it seems that the majority of us prefer the hyphen. I >would guess that common usage goes both ways.
google searches for common usage seem to say that "email" wins. in fact, if you search for "e-mail", it asks: "did you mean email?": email: ~110,000,000 e-mail: ~8,140,000 but statistics can lie...
The usual English style would be to capitalize the first letter (the term does not have to be a proper name), such as U-boat, C-section, A-bomb, H-bomb. But in the computer age, style evolves at a different rate and on different terms than in the past. As a former copyeditor, I thought that "email" was grotesque when I first saw it in Communicator. But I'm over that. Netscape style is still "email." It's still in the interface (Addressing prefs pane, e.g.). Users have not complained about it or misunderstood it, as far as I'm aware. The instances of "e-mail" in the app were anomalous. Let's not change the UI now, as what we've had has worked these many years. And arguably, we conform to general contemporary English usage. Our style should be: "email."
anyone considered if "e-mail" (or "email") can be used as a verb (e.g. in "please e-mail me") take discussion off to n.p.m.documentation http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=netscape.public.mozilla.documentation&selm=aicqjl%249oj3%40ripley.netscape.com
Keywords: mozilla1.2, polish
Voting for E-mail.
uid is being phased out.
Assignee: mpt → jglick
Component: User Interface Design → Tracking
QA Contact: zach → jruderman
rudman, please make the final decision and close this bug. Thanks.
Assignee: jglick → rudman
Keywords: mozilla1.2 → mozilla1.3
-> nobody rudman is no longer working on Mozilla
Assignee: rudman → nobody
i'd vote for mail
Assignee: nobody → neil.parkwaycc.co.uk
Hmm... looks like those regexp searches aren't working right now :-/
Marking all tracking bugs which haven't been updated since 2014 as INCOMPLETE. If this bug is still relevant, please reopen it and move it into a bugzilla component related to the work being tracked. The Core: Tracking component will no longer be used.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 9 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
Product: Core → Core Graveyard
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.