Email Salutations

I received an important email and replied to it. What I forgot was a salutation. You know, "Dear Mr. Doodledoo, " Forgetting that salutations are good manners, I messed up. It's a good thing they contacted me again.

Then I started thinking. How do we make a salutation in the digital age? In school (back when we still used pen and paper), we wrote:

 Dear Mr Doodledoo, 

This salutation has been kind of the standard. This is written neatly above the message body with an empty line before the message body. These days, it feels kinda weird. You don't say dear to just about anybody, and it comes across as too formal.


When I worked with editors in one company (I don't know how I got there, believe me), salutations go:

Hi, Mike.

Either as the first few words in a paragraph or separately above the message body, they insisted that it is the proper way. It looks a bit abrupt for me.

When I moved to a different company, they went with:

Hi Mike,

I noticed this trend with a lot of companies. I found it weird at first, but eventually got used to it. Been looking on some websites and found a lot of professionals in agreement with that kind of salutations, even in formal messages. A "Hi," or "Hello," can be enough.

The Internet tells us that several salutation formats are acceptable, with some even saying that the absence of it is still acceptable. I think the difference with writing back in the day is how it is governed by rules that is often ignored by modern times. Just looking at Facebook and Twitter posts is a proof of that.

Sometimes, you would just wish that somebody makes a rule for formal Internet writing. It makes me second-guess a lot.