Email - Are greetings and salutations redundant?

In human culture there is always an ongoing 'conversation' between technologies and the way that we incorporate them into our lives socially. Thus things that are important to us in the social arena will be marked in various ways in the way that we view and employ our technologis: power, status, solidarity, etc will inevitably be inscribed into our appropriation of tech. I'm interested to see how this evolves in regard to email, for example and have been thinking in odd moments about it for a couple of years or more now. So it is interesting to me to see that there is an online conversation about it.

My musing was piqued by noting the way that late-comers to the email game tended to stand out like sore thumbs to those of us who had been using email since it's earlier days: they treat(ed) email like letters: formal beginnings and endings, for example. The difficulty that presents, of course, is the second-guessing game: do we reply in kind and re-instate the hierarchical paraphernalia that a lot of the early internet was getting away from or do we risk being misunderstood by sticking with the informality-conventions of the Peoples' Republic of the Internet. I'd have to say that I've come to the view that those who are sticklers for formality have a right to be heard and to some respect, so I usually try to offer some kind of respectful opening and closing to people I don't know whom I judge may possibly be 'old school' (but as far as possible I try to avoid the 'Dear N' thing because I'm keen to signal that email isn't the same as letter writing). So I'd more or less go along with this advice:
email - Are greetings and salutations redundant in an e-mail? - English Language and Usage - Stack Exchange: "When writing to older persons, persons in authority, superiors, et al, I recommend a salutation and a complimentary close. These are not 'wastes of time' by any means - they serve very specific functions if you are skilled in their use. Both the opening and the close allow you to frame your relationship with the recipient"

The other interesting thing though is the way, I notice, that exchanges quickly seem to cease to use a greeting phrase at all; I think that threaded conversations are probably seen as just that: conversations, so restating the addressee's name or re-greeting them would seem to be somewhat gauche. However, I suspect that this may 'feel' quite brusque to 'old school' writers.

Remember; this is an ongoing conversation, the way that we do it influences the direction that the emerging consensus goes. It's like speaking: the register we use communicates our attitudes of respect or not, a sense of solidarity or not, a framing of where we think each other are in respect of power relationships, a sense of our estimate of fashionableness, gender, nationality and other shared (or not) characteristics. The difficult cases come where we don't really know the other person: that's where the politeness formulae come into their own: they buy us time to suss out the various dimensions of the relationship that could have a bearing on how we continue to address one another and relate.

And is there a specifically Christian take on this? Well, I think in general there is but it's not earth-shattering: give respect to all, do as you would be done by, inasfar as it lies with you live at peace with all. However, I would say further though, that I think that the internet in terms of its history probably has a bit more 'sympathy' with the Quaker simplicity ethic which led them to avoid over-formal speech and address-forms because people are equal before God. I think that this might indicate that it would be fair to try to pull the use of greetings and sigs in the direction of friendly informality as far as possible.