Three quarters of email begins with nothing
75% of real email opens with no greeting at all. We counted 71,216 messages: "Hi" dominates the rest — and "Dear" is now a phishing tell.
Every email column opens with a salutation, treated as a critical decision. Incorrect salutations make the email seem stiff, familiar, American, or too much. Consultancies exist to advise on whether to write "Dear Ms Patel" or "Hi Priya." The study examined 71,216 real emails and found that the majority skip the greeting entirely.
This behavior is consistent across two datasets: the Git mailing list and Enron's internal mail. 75.1% of messages in these datasets open with no greeting at all, while 15.6% begin with a bare name followed by straight into it. Only 9.3% of email begins with the traditional salutation mentioned in advice columns.
The study's findings are not new and not a sign of decline. Joan Waldvogel's 2007 study of 515 workplace emails from two New Zealand organizations found a 59% no-greeting rate in one organization (a government-funded education provider) compared to just 17% in a manufacturing plant. Culture, rather than status, social distance, or gender, predicts greeting behavior better.
When people do greet, they tend to say "Hi." Narrowing down the messages that use a greeting word, "Hi" takes 67.9% of all greetings on the Git list, followed by "Hello" at 20.4%. "Dear" accounts for 5.5%, and "Hey" is the least common, making up 2.3%. In Enron's email, greetings split almost evenly between "Hi" (35.2%) and "Dear" (28.8%). Over time, the use of "Hi" has increased on the Git mailing list.
Written by urgent.news from HackerNoon's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
