I sometimes use a hyphen. I would never use a dash in that fashion. The National Society for Grammatical Correctness would like to invite you to our re-education camp. After a fun day of hand-sorting hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, you will collapse onto your hard concrete slab knowing that punctuation is as important to the sentence as spelling is to the word--and also that Grammar Nazis are jerks.

But the real question is why we haven't simply dropped the 'e' altogether and differentiate it from the physical shipment of papers by calling the latter "postal mail" or "snail mail" or "paper mail" or something else reflecting its reduced status as a means of communication.

The New York Times only just dropped the hyphen:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/5022332/the-new-york-time...

Worse (imo) was their long-time refusal to use the term "weblog" for such sites even though the inventors of the word, years before there were any articles about them, had always spelled it as one word, leading to such awkward copy as "a Web log, or 'blog'". The willingness to accept one neologism at face value ("blog") but not its ancestor ("weblog") reveals an unhealthy tendency to favor false logic ("we call it the World Wide Web, so it must be 'Web log'") over the actual history and usage of a word. Style guides should be about improving clarity, but changing the capitalization and adding a space to a new word is only going to cause confusion.

It hardly matters now that the original variant "weblog" is basically gone from actual usage, but I think it's a useful glimpse into the editors' mindset.

I still have trouble when writing - is it email, eMail, or Email?

I do. I can send you an e-mail confirmation if you'd like.

The different perceptions of what a ;) suggests is also fun to watch.

You're right. I'm still engaged by the "Internet" vs. "internet" debate.