Best regards, Kind regards, Yours sincerely

Hi Benny,

Welcome to the Forum.

Email is still new enough that conventions are still evolving. It's far from universally agreed that the conventions for regular, non-email business letters will simply be automatically followed in email. Email began as an informal. 'short-hand' medium, and in fact most people still seem to be influenced by this. I don't think it will ever be as form

"Best regards", "Kind regards", and "Kindest regards" are all fairly common in BrE business emails. "Best wishes" is also used.

You also sometimes see Best followed by a comma, which always disconcerts me.

MrP

As was pointed out "yours faithfully" is out of style but it still can be found in use especially in British English. However, as was also pointed out, there are alternatives that are used in both British and American (North American) English.

More formal
Sincerely yours, Yours sincerely, or even just Sincerely

Less formal
Sincerel

As far as the capitalization in the closing, my grammar book says to capitalize all letters only if it's a business letter or any other formal type of letter.

Best Regards,

Monseul

MonseulAs far as the capitalization in the closing, my grammar book says to capitalize all letters only if it's a business letter or any other formal type of letter.

Best Regards,

Monseul

Capitalize the first word only (i.e., Thank you, Kind regards, etc.)

"Kind Regards", "Best Wishes", etc. makes an email look a little like a greetings card. I'd only upper-case the first word.

MrP

Bubeldk

Reading this very long tread I think that one should conclude that if you know the person, you can use "Yours sincerely", and if you do not know the person, you should use "Yours faithfully".

Some years ago, when I was taught how to write formal letters, they told me that this was indeed the rule.

Best,

Sextus

Other common expressions are:

All the best, All the best wishes, Cheers, which I think are neither formal nor informal. Or perhaps I'm wrong about this.

So, MrP, the use of "Best," disconcerts you...

Sextus

Hi guys,

I think we should clarify just what kind of business emails we are talking about here. In his original post, Bubeldk spoke of his company going into a new country. Perhaps he/she might give us a short example of such an email. Failing that, the other posters should do this, to show how they want to end such a thing. Otherwise, I suspect we are all envisaging and discussing differ

Clive

I would even attempt to argue that there is no such thing as a truly formal email. By definition, it's a less formal medium. If my small company wanted to make an initial approach to IBM to do business, I wouldn't even use email. I'd take the best quality paper I could find and go to a printer and get the most impressive-looking letterhead I could d