It feels like the 18th century all over again. All that daily correspondence, all those long hours spent hunched over a desk, composing some thoughtful missive about one's dowry or the Jacobite rebellions. Signed, ``Yr humble servant.''

Same deal now, basically, except we're not clutching quills; we're writing a passel of e-mails and clicking send on ye olde BlackBerry. And something else isn't quite the same: Unlike the heroes and heroines of epistolary novels, we aren't blessed with time-tested formal guidance on the correct way to sign off.

``Best''?

``Cheers''?

``Sincerely''?

For Daniel Morrison, CEO of the international relief nonprofit 1Well, the wrong sign-off posed an impediment to deeper romance.

``I sent an e-mail to a girlfriend, and she was very put off by me signing off with `Regards,' saying that I sounded very `emotionally detached,' '' Morrison says via e-mail. ``We did break up shortly thereafter, so maybe she was right.''

Will Schwalbe, co-author with David Shipley of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, warns, ``You can really do a lot of damage, even with a careless closing. And one of the terrifying things about e-mail is: You may never know.'' But you may well feel the chill.

``If you have been writing to someone `Best' this and `Best' that, and you get an e-mail that is a little colder, a little hostile, and they sign `Sincerely,' that does mean things aren't so good,'' Schwalbe says. `` `Sincerely' is the one that says, `There's a problem here.' ''

And, one may well wonder, does ``Cordially'' ever mean anything other than ``My hostility is only thinly veiled''?

IS `BEST' BEST?

Craig Brownstein, vice president of media relations at the PR firm Edelman, is a devotee of ``Best'' and its variants. He says he started seeing ``Best'' in e-mails a few years ago and has since picked it up. But that professional close can quickly escalate into greater e-intimacies.

Brownstein asked his research team, StrategyOne, to catalog the most common e-mail closing lines with an online poll. (The sample of about a thousand Internet users came from a nonrandom pool of respondents, so these numbers are rather more food for thought than hard data.)

``Best,'' as it happens, was barely a blip on this survey's radar. Twenty-five percent of participants said they close their professional e-mails with ``Sincerely,'' while 20 percent use some variant of ``Thank you,'' and 17 percent use no closing at all. ``Love'' is the most common personal e-mail closing, followed by no closing.

This all might come as no great surprise to Peter Post, author of Essential Manners for Men, and one of manner maven Emily Post's great-grandchildren. Post swears by ``Sincerely,'' which he describes as an all-purpose, ``safe'' e-mail close -- the little black dress of sign-offs, if you will. ``Yours truly'' and ``Regards'' can also work, Post says.

In their book, Schwalbe and Shipley recommend ``Best'' and ``Best wishes'' as ``among the most common in e-mail -- safe, all-purpose ways of bringing a note to an end.''

Schwalbe himself often ratchets ``Best'' up to ``Best!'' -- with the exclamation point added to warm up a medium in which everything can unfortunately sound a wee bit frigid and humorless.

Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, likewise, says that one can do better than ``Sincerely.''

``The problem with traditional sign-offs like `Sincerely' is not so much that they're too cold as that they're like vestiges of another medium: letters,'' Huffington says. ``I've always used `Best' or `All the best,' because that's always been standard for me, even for letters. And I never liked `Sincerely' -- I always found it very cold.''

FOR MARINES, IT'S `S/F'

Murky waters unless you're in the military, where specific closings are standard. Matthew Cox, a senior staff writer at The Army Times, says that members of the Navy and the Air Force often close their e-mails with ``V/R'' (``Very respectfully''). For the Marines, it's ``S/F'' (Semper Fi), while Army Rangers sign off with ``RLTW'' (``Rangers Lead the Way'').

Participants in the StrategyOne survey reported all manner of e-mail closings that tumble forth from correspondents reveling in the intoxicating mania of near-instantaneous communication. Among them: ``In brotherhood,'' ``That's me yo,'' ``Hope you live through the night,'' ``Safety first,'' ``Wonka wonka'' and ``Seacrest out.''

Until e-mail etiquette starts being taught in elementary school, perhaps we've little choice left but to hit send first and ask forgiveness later.

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