e-mail, not email

commentary

We don't write ubend, aframe, oring, abomb, hbomb, alist, blist, bboy, bside, csection, dday, hhour, ebook, ecommerce, fhole, fnumber, fstop, nor as much fword, vsign, tshirt, gstring, yfronts, tback, vneck, tzone, gspot, and certainly never ldriver, lplate, tjunction, uturn, uey, sbend, vsix, tbar, tbone, tcells, svideo, xrated, or xray, so why do we write email?

It's probable that the dash has been lost in the mail, as it were, as the word has moved itself out of the computing lexicon and into common everyday usage. However, whether this mail issue actually owes to a form of slovenliness within the male, is out for speculation . . .

And while we're sorting through it, 'mail' has always been uncountable. So that:

'I have some mail (or "post"†)'

is in high frequency, but not,

'I have three mails'!

'I have three e-mails' has become frequent – I have three electronic mails?

A verb, yes: 'we mailed it to them'. letters, pages, sheets, leafs, folios, postcards, memos, memorandums, newsletters, notes, cards and messages.

From the 2011 publication of the Oxford Dictionary of English:-

message /'mɛsɪdʒ /► noun1. a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly: if I'm not there leave a message on the answerphone. 

■  (also mail message)  an item of electronic mail.

At current, 'email' scores an 11.06 billion uses on the web versus a 6.19 billion uses of the hyphenated 'e-mail'.

Users, junk email and keep 'e-mail' if we're being presecriptive.

I suppose 'mail messages' has more syllables than mails.

† 'mail' is Standard American English when used with reference to the postal system e.g. you can order by mail. In British English, you can order by post.