Learn English – Which one is correct between “chain of email” and “chain of emails”

phrase-usageusage

What is the correct usage between "a chain of email" and "a chain of emails"? Why?

By "a chain of email" I mean an email thread where many people have chimed in from time to time and that has grown very large over time.

Best Answer

I would call this an email thread, rather than a chain of email. You can read more about email threads here, here, and here, and see if that would be a good term. As one of those websites says:

An email thread is an email message and a running list of all of the subsequent replies pertaining to the original email.

Getting back to your question, mail can be considered a mass noun (much like sand, rice, and money), meaning that it can be tricky figuring out when and when not to pluralize the word.

If, for some reason, you didn't want to use email thread, I would call it a chain of email if it was one message that got forwarded many times. To me, emails connotes several distinct messages from several different sources, not one message that got appended with several subsequent replies.

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