Interesting marketing strategy. As there are several words I would like to decide the official spelling of, I will shortly be setting up the zCat Experience Council and will begin sending out press releases. The Council has already decided that the correct spelling of "webmaster" is in fact "webmaster" and not "web-master", "web master", "webMaster" or "widget warbler".

;)

DO they have nothing better to do ?

I am not surprised by this announcement. "email" is the preferred spelling of professor Donald Knuth for a few decades now, see [www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu...] It seems to be part of normal spelling evolution for new words.

Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words.

This is how Knuth it explains. The only difference is that he wrote this about 15 years before the EEC...

Before this announcement there was no real reason to pick one above the other. Since this announcement there's a lot of incentive for us to pick e-mail.

I usually write "e-mail" but it seems like most people online search for "email" so that is what I use on my sites.

So what do we do if "email" is to be the first word in a sentence?

Should we write, for example, "email is the name for electronic mail...",
or should we write "Email is the ...".

Rules of grammer require that the first word of a sentence has a capital letter.

So what do we do if "email" is to be the first word in a sentence?

They cover that in the article. If it's the first word in a sentence then it follows the standard grammar/capitalization rules and would be capitalized.

Considering that the eec were setting forth a standard here I found it a bit odd that they had no standard HTML announcement. Also I found their use of punctuation a bit inconsistent / lacking at points. ;)

This "organization" has only had a domain name registered since May 2006. And, the registrant organization name is not the organization name, but one of the "co-founder's" names. And, the tech contact is "YahooDomains TechContact."

C'mon, does no one else smell the catch of the day?

Sorry, but I refuse to follow the edicts of any organization that uses all lower case letters in their own organization's acronym. (Even on their own website the use: "Email Experience Council (eec)")

If they called themselves "EEC" instead of "eec" they would carry a lot more weight. Of course, I would still refuse to follow them. :)

This "international" "industry" organization has 2 members of their board of directors.

Both members of the board work for the same company. Shouldn't they have some representitives from some of the larger email providers as well as those that write the servers and clients?

They are both in marketing. No one in the technical side of the e-mail experience, and since they are deciding words, should they have some linguists?

Where is their RFC process?

Screw em! Spell Email using whatever of the acceptable methods that you want, and make fun of these pompass clowns at every opportunity.

...make fun of these pompass clowns at every opportunity.

That would just give them free publicity.

Better to ignore them completely.