ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of public email in the mid-1990s. The language of email was in great flux at the time because of the relative newness of the medium to most users, and the absence of clear norms as to what was appropriate. The heart of the chapter is an analysis of two corpora of official or public letters between strangers. One is a set of responses to a Call for Papers that the author distributed on the Internet in 1994-1995. The other corpus is the author's correspondence with a software developer in 1993-94 about the possibility of ordering the software. The chapter looks at how he changed his style over time. It also presents some letters that the author received from students. The strongly colloquial “I feel quite spiffy too!” violates the norm that in written initial interaction between strangers, one does not offer information about one’s state of health.
