Though relatively new, email is becoming increasingly prevalent in both our personal and professional lives. Yet the underlying processes of email communication are often poorly understood, especially as far as politeness is concerned. deprived of the wealth of prosodic and non-verbal features which can add supplementary support to politeness, email presents many communication challenges to users. Differing cultural discourse styles create differing ways to embed politeness within the language. Uncertainty remains over expectations of politeness as well as appropriate ways to incorporate it in email language. No guidelines currently exist which can offer a politeness protocol for our email messages.