Abstract
Although e-mail has become an everyday form of communication at universities, irritations occur time and again - triggered by e-mails that are sometimes perceived as "sloppy" or "cheeky" on the part of the teachers. This article takes this phenomenon as an opportunity to explore the question of why few generally applicable rules have emerged in email communication to date. Firstly, the thesis is put forward that the (often criticised) student emails are by no means written without rules; however, they are experienced as "deviant" by the recipients, since the email as a genre or text type - especially at the beginning of the communication - is based on very different reference text types: the authors orient themselves on numerous other formats, such as the letter, the short note, the everyday conversation, the procedural instruction or the comment. Only in the course of further email communication can common rules be negotiated. However, since - according to the second thesis in the following - e-mail communication mostly remains closed interpersonally, there is no collective formation of norms that would be permanently shared by larger publics. As long as the reference norms at the beginning of an exchange are so different, and they have to be adjusted interpersonally for the respective digital interaction in the course of time, e-mail will be perceived as an individualising, supposedly ruleless "self-runner". The two theses are not based on our own empirical surveys, but rather represent considerations that take up the everyday phenomenon of "norm violation" in e-mail texts - methodically exploratory on the basis of sample texts - in order to contrast or develop it with research findings on the specificity of e-mail or digital communication.
