The new mail bonding

In the current edition of The Week, Selina Hastings has been asked to name her six favourite reference books, and one of them is Titles and Forms of Address (Adam & Charles, £10.99). This, according to her, "will guide you on the correct way to refer to everyone from marquesses and archdeacons to the children of the widows of the younger sons of barons".

I very much fear that it won't help me with my problem, though – how to address e-mails to people, no matter of what rank.

I haven't been doing e-mails for very long, but you don't have to do them for very long to realise that the etiquette of e-mails is very different from the etiquette of letter-writing. The day I got an e-mail from an unknown American starting "Hey Miles!" I knew I had wandered into a new world.

Other people write "Hi Miles" and "Miles Hi", and a man from Scotland greeted me as "What ho Miles", and somebody I had hitherto trusted e-mailed me as "Yo Miles!", and the trouble is that I am unable to respond in like fashion because for so many year I have been groomed to write letters, and you don't start letters with "Hi!". You start letters, "Dear".

Which is just as ridiculous as "Hi" when you come to think about it, because very few people to whom you write are actually dear to you at all. And when you sign off "yours sincerely" or "yours faithfully", you are seldom being either sincere or faithful. I suppose that is why letter-writers came to adopt other endings such as "all best wishes" or "yours ever" or "kindest regards". I suppose also it is why some writers have made a determined effort to invent greetings of their own.

For instance, I have had a few letters over the years from Frank Muir, and Frank always signed himself "thine, Frank", which was a little arch, but it showed he had thought about it. H L Mencken, the American polemicist and determined atheist, very often signed his letters "yours in Christ", or simply "yrs in Xt", which must have annoyed a few people, as he presumably intended to. I always wanted to devise a personal ending of my own, and occasionally I have ended letters with "yours and all that", or "yrs sncrly" or even "yoursly", but my heart was never in any of them.

Now, suddenly, I am in the e-mail world and I have become "Hi Miles" and "Hey Miles" to people who don't really have an ending at all to their e-mails, but just stop writing them without signing off. If people are older than about 40, they tend to address me as "Hello Miles", but that's only a milder version of "Hi Miles", so when I find myself e-mailing someone and starting the e-mail, "Dear so-and-so", I feel incredibly old-fashioned , like some maiden aunt crawling out of an Agatha Christie.

However, I think I have worked out why it is so hard for a letter-writer to change over to e-mail etiquette. E-mails are not a continuation of letter writing. They are a continuation of telephone messages. Do you remember when answering machines and voice mail first came in, and everyone claimed to be confused by having to leave a message on a machine because they didn't know how to talk to it? Well, we have all finally learnt how to talk to machines. We have learnt how to say, "Hi, I called to say hello," or "Hello, mom, just rang up to say thanks..." and the way we talked to those machines is the same way we talk in e-mails.

E-mails are conversational. They are not literature, they are conversations which happen to be written down, and the curious spellings and abbreviations come from that fact. The sooner I get used to the idea that an e-mail is a transcribed phone message, and not an electronic letter, the easier it will be for me to get through the Hi barrier and start e-mails with "Hi, widow of the younger son of a baron!"

But even then we can keep standards up. The other day I was being driven by a young London taxi driver who was delving deep into a book at every traffic light. "What are you reading?" I asked. "I'm not reading," he said. "I'm consulting a dictionary. See, I'm trying to write a really rude text message to my ex-girlfriend, and she always made fun of my bad spelling, so I'm not giving her a single chance to criticise it this time. I'm trying to be really rude, but accurately."

Thank goodness young people still care about the old values.