Three quarters of email begins with nothing
Every email advice column in existence opens with the salutation. It is treated as the load-bearing decision — get it wrong and you are too stiff, too familiar, too American, too much. Entire consultancies exist to tell you whether to write Dear Ms Patel or Hi Priya.
We counted the openings of 71,216 real emails. The overwhelming majority of them skip the question entirely.
This is the sister study to our analysis of how those same emails end. Same 71,216 messages, opposite end of the page: who says hi, who says hello, who says Dear — and why the most common greeting in real correspondence is no greeting at all.
The 75% who say nothing
Across the two human corpora in our dataset — the Git mailing list (44,627 messages, 2022–2026) and Enron's internal mail (12,091 messages, 1999–2002) — 75.1% of messages open with no greeting of any...
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