For me the style of writing as I become more familiar with somebody goes like this:
- Initial contact, "Dear ..", "Kind Regards,"
- Slightly looser, "Hi ...", "Many thanks," or "Yours,"
- Pretty friendly "Name," or "Hey name,", "Thanks" "Cheers" etc
- Very friendly, no mention of their name at the start, signing with just "Corin" or "C"
And it depends on who it is as to what stage it gets to. Generally the people I talk to either reciprocate following a similar structure, or they follow that structure before I do, leaving me to reciprocate.
I match what the other does to me. That said, I am a little annoyed with the concepts of greeting and signature within an email. Thanks to the "From:" and "To:" headers, this is redundant data. A lot of people write emails as if they were writing snail mail. Yet, simultaneously, those greetings and signatures do sometimes convey a certain formality because of my experience with snail mail; depending on my mood, I will either chuckle at the "Dear Sir" or read the contents in a more businesslike tone. I wonder if these parts of the writing structure will fall out of fashion in another 50 years.
When I'm writing snail mail I write the recipient's address, and my own, right at the top of page one; then I still use greetings/signitures. The signiture is used partly as a formality, partly as an indicator of warmth/personalisation - it's not meant to be for the reader to go "oh, so that's who wrote it".
I disagree. The salutation sets the tone of the body. Just by reading "Dear Sir", I know that the body will probably be impersonal, yet polite. If I see "[Name]," I know the body will be professional and to-the-point. "Hi [Name]" sets a friendly tone, often followed by a request. If I do not see a salutation, odds are that the body was written in haste (or in reply to an existing thread).
