electronic mail

English

Noun

electronic mail (countable and uncountable, plural electronic mails)

1. (uncountable, networking) Email (the system). [from 1970s]
   • 1992, Sara Radicati, Electronic Mail: An Introduction to the X.400 Message Handling Standards, McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 1:

     Electronic mail is the single most visible application of distributed computing today.

   • 1996, Raymond, Eric S., Steele, Guy L., editors, The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3 edition, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 13:

     […] the impossibility of representing such noises [‘mumble’, ‘sigh’, and ‘groan’] on a comm link or in electronic mail […]

2. (countable, rare) An email.
   • 2006, Edward Wilding, Information Risk and Security, Gower Publishing, Ltd., →ISBN, page 306:

     Employees are asked to exercise extreme caution when opening electronic mails and attachments sent by unknown or unfamiliar correspondents, or which require the recipient to execute a program, open an attachment or decompress an archive such as a Winzip™ file.

Derived terms

• e-mail, email

Translations

email — see email

Further reading

• email on Wikipedia.Wikipedia