That's "e-mail". ( ducking ). Sorry, it's my pet peeve.
The "e" is a modifier, delineating the type of mail. Therefore, the phrase should be hyphenated, even though some dictionaries bastardize the language by using the phrase without one.
Carry on :)
Interesting that you bring that up. I wrote a colloquium paper on eCommerce discussing the usage of new terminology in technology, specifically the proliferation of acronyms in common conversation.
During the discussion portion, several undergrads asked me about proper construction of e-anything words, and I heard myriad corrections ranging from small-e, e-hyphen, large-e, and even e-space. I took it upon myself to do some research on the subject.
You’re not wrong, but it’s one of those things that vary so greatly from one person/culture to another that there’s no definitive source on the proper usage.
For instance, eCommerce could be e-commerce, but you often see it as I wrote it. Grammar and spelling checks will usually correct it dependent on where in a sentence the word lands, but there’s nothing that says one is right over the other. For the longest time I wrote small-e (i.e. eMail or eCommerce), but as popular discussion advances, I have a feeling that email will become a noun requiring no capitalization (i.e. improper), as it is the simplest way to write the “word.”