A correspondent has asked about email etiquette and would be interested to know about formal and informal email openings and sign offs. Do you, for example, always start with a greeting of some kind and finish with a farewell? Or do you sometimes omit one or other of these? What kind of greetings and sign offs do you use, and do they depend on the context?

In my previous job some of the emails I sent were simple one word or one sentence ones without greetings or sign offs which said things like “Done”, “Sorted”, “I’ve done that now”, etc., but I only wrote in this way when replying to colleagues I knew well. Normally I almost always include greetings, such as Hi or Hello, and farewells, such as Regards or Best wishes, in my emails, except in some replies.