Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003)

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

61 pointsted056 comments

"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.

Jealous.

Oh, I have a secretary like that too; she's called The New Gmail

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

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...

I think it works pretty damn amazingly.

D. 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

Yeah, the take-home (takehome?) message in this essay is "have a meatspace spamfilter and things are peachy".

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.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-hyphen-...

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-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.

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.

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 but yeah :3

"Homer: Do you want the job done right or do you want it done fast? Marge: Well, like all Americans... fast!"

As an American, I figure that the most efficient (or maybe you prefer "laziest") option will win in the end. This means dropping spaces and hyphens whenever possible.

Given this, I'm going to say "realtime" will eventually win. It's apparently already in my dictionary since it's not even marked as a spelling mistake.

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

Agreed, it would save a lot of keystrokes if we just call it mail :)

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

You can get 90% of the way there if you turn off gmail notifications on your phone.

ummm how about only navigating to your gmail page when you want to check mail?

"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.

Our landing page is a bit silly (it was a hackathon project), but my company made Inbox Pause (http://inboxpause.com), which works by automating the creation and deletion of Gmail filters at scheduled times. If you aren't comfortable with installing an extension on top of Gmail, you can also try it on your own with the same filters manually.

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

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

The 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.

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. ;)

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...

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.

> 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.

That's not how most secretaries work, so that service should be called "Knuthian Secretary" :)

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

"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?

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

Of course the pronounciation is very different.

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

which is not used in France but rather in Quebec.

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

I am German and I did not know this, was only aware of the alternative form Emaille.

Is that really it? Thought it might go deeper than that and I'm missing on some "cultural background" :)

The correct German spelling is E-Mail.

For French, he's probably referring to the word "émail", which means "enamel". To my knowledge, the word "email" without an accent does not exist in French.

email is the word used in french for electronic mail. I rarely see people writing e-mail, and more often see people writing mail or email.

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...

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

Massive douche.

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

Kids, these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com