Episode Details

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/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.
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The sister study to our sign-off analysis — same 71,216 emails, opposite end of the message. 75.1% of human email opens with no greeting at all, and another 15.6% with just a bare name, leaving 9.3% that begins the way every etiquette guide assumes all email does. Among those who do greet, "Hi" takes 67.9% of Git mailing list greetings against 5.5% for "Dear"; at Enron in 1999–2002 it was far closer, 35.2% to 28.8%. The fraud corpora invert it: "Hello" and "Dear" are each 3.3x more common in spam and phishing, while humans use "Hi" nearly twice as often as scammers do. No-greeting rates run from 3% in Arabic academic email to 81% on the Git list — and on that list, greetings are rising, not falling.