Email in Portuguese: How to Say and Write It

Email in Portuguese: How to Say and Write It

The word for email in Portuguese is "e-mail," with a hyphen, or "email," without one. Both spellings are everywhere, in Brazil and in Portugal, and both are pronounced close to the English word you already know. You will also run into "correio eletrônico" (or "correio electrónico" in Portugal), which means "electronic mail" and sounds a lot like the stiff, legal English phrase it translates. Nobody says "correio eletrônico" out loud to a friend. People say "me manda um email" (send me an email) or "eu te mando um e-mail" (I'll send you an email), and they move on with their day.

If you have ever opened a Portuguese-Portuguese dictionary looking for a "real" native word for email and found nothing that felt local, that is normal. Portuguese did what English does with lots of tech words: it borrowed "email" wholesale and gave it a Portuguese life, a gender, a plural, and a place in everyday speech. The Cambridge Dictionary's English-Portuguese entry for email lists both spellings side by side, and so does the entry for e-mail, which tells you something useful right away: you are not going to get in trouble for picking either one.

This guide walks through everything you need to actually use the word "email" in Portuguese: how to say it out loud, whether it is masculine or feminine, how to build a full inbox vocabulary, how to write a formal email to a stranger, how to write an informal one to a friend, and how to avoid the small mistakes that make an email sound like it was translated by a robot. If you are learning Portuguese to actually speak it with people, not just read about it, Comigo is built for exactly that kind of practice, and we will circle back to why that matters for something as "written" as email later on.

How do you pronounce "email" in Portuguese?

Because "email" is a borrowed English word, there is no single official Portuguese spelling reform that tells you exactly how to pronounce it, and you will hear small variations depending on the speaker and the region. Broadly, Brazilians say something close to "ee-mayw," with a soft, rounded ending on the final sound, the same way a word like "Brasil" trails off into something closer to a "w" sound than a hard English "l." The stress usually lands on the first syllable, "EE-mayw," not the second one the way some English speakers might guess at first glance.

Rather than trust an invented phonetic spelling, the most reliable way to hear it correctly is to listen to real speakers say it out loud. Forvo collects short audio clips of native speakers pronouncing individual words, and YouGlish pulls real YouTube clips of a word used mid-sentence, which is even better for picking up the natural rhythm around it. Type "email" into either site with Portuguese selected as the language, and you will hear the word said dozens of times by different people, in different accents and at different speeds, which teaches your ear far more than any single written guide, including this one, ever could.

If your ear is still new to Portuguese sounds in general, it helps to get comfortable with simpler, high-frequency words first. Practice how to say hello in Portuguese, how to ask how are you in Portuguese, or how to say good morning in Portuguese. Once your mouth gets used to Portuguese vowels and that soft final sound, a borrowed word like "email" stops feeling like a foreign object dropped awkwardly into the sentence and starts feeling like just another Portuguese word.

Is "email" masculine or feminine in Portuguese?

"Email" is a masculine noun in Portuguese: "o email" or "o e-mail," never "a email." That means every article and adjective that touches it follows the masculine pattern too. You would say "um email importante" (an important email), not "uma email importante," and "esse email" (this email), not "essa email." The Cambridge Dictionary's entry for mail confirms the same masculine gender and gives a natural example sentence to anchor it: "Você tem novos e-mails" (you have new emails).

The plural follows the regular pattern for loanwords that end in a consonant sound: you just add an "s," the same way English does. "Um email" becomes "dois emails." "Um e-mail" becomes "vários e-mails." There is no accent to add and no irregular plural to memorize, which puts "email" comfortably in the easy category compared to plenty of native Portuguese nouns that shift their spelling in the plural. If grammatical gender still feels like a bit of a guessing game in general, especially once you add verbs into the mix, working through something like the ser conjugation in Portuguese is a good parallel exercise, since gender agreement and verb conjugation are the two grammar habits that usually take the longest to feel automatic for English speakers.

Email, e-mail, or correio eletrônico: which one should you use?

Here is the honest answer: both "email" and "e-mail" are correct, common, and used interchangeably by native speakers in Brazil and in Portugal. You will see "e-mail" with the hyphen more often in careful, formal, or edited writing, like a newspaper article or a company's official terms of service, and you will see "email" without it everywhere in daily texting, casual writing, and spoken transcription. This is not, however, a hard regional rule where Brazil does one thing and Portugal does another. Dictionaries and usage guides on both sides of the Atlantic list both spellings without drawing a firm line between them, and the safest move is simply to match whatever spelling the person or company you are writing to already uses in their own messages.

"Correio eletrônico" ("correio electrónico" in European Portuguese spelling) is the fully translated, formal term, literally "electronic mail." You will find it in legal documents, on some official government forms, or in a very old-fashioned business letter, but almost nobody says it out loud in everyday conversation. If a Brazilian friend texted you "me manda seu correio eletrônico," it would sound almost comically formal, roughly like asking someone for their "electronic mail address" in English instead of simply "your email." Dictionaries like Collins, bab.la, and Linguee all list "correio eletrônico" as a valid but secondary translation, sitting right alongside "email" and "e-mail," which matches how rarely you will actually hear it used out loud.

For a closer look at how Portuguese speakers structure a written message from the ground up, Practice Portuguese's guide to writing an email is worth bookmarking, and the Reverso Context page for e-mail is handy for seeing the word used inside dozens of real, translated sentences rather than sitting alone in a list. Between the two, you will start to notice the same pattern this whole section describes: plenty of variation, no rigid rule, and a strong preference for whatever spelling feels natural to the writer.

This kind of split spelling is not unique to Portuguese. English itself never fully settled the question either, older style guides still argue over "e-mail" versus "email" in English writing, so it makes sense that a borrowed word would carry some of that same uncertainty across into Portuguese. If you ever feel unsure which version to pick in a message you are writing, a simple trick works well: scroll up to the last email the other person sent you and copy their spelling. It costs nothing, it always reads as correct, and it quietly signals that you paid attention to how they write.

Core email vocabulary in Portuguese

Before you can write a single email, it helps to know the names of the parts you are actually looking at on the screen. Below is a fuller vocabulary table you can keep open in another tab while you write, covering the words you will run into in almost any inbox, Brazilian or Portuguese.

For a deeper vocabulary dive with more example sentences, rioandlearn.com's email guide and Talkpal's vocabulary list for emails and letters both expand on this same core list. If you want to compare Brazilian and European usage side by side, languagedrops.com has a Brazilian Portuguese version and a European Portuguese version of essentially the same vocabulary set, and the differences between the two are smaller than you might expect. The Cambridge Dictionary also has standalone entries for inbox and attachment, useful if you ever want a quick second source to double check a single word.

Verbs and phrases for talking about email

Nouns get you the labels on the screen. Verbs get you a working sentence. Here are the everyday verb phrases you will actually use when you talk about sending, receiving, and managing email in Portuguese, each one shown inside a real example sentence rather than sitting alone.

Notice that "mandar" and "enviar" mean the same thing, but "mandar" feels like something you'd say to a friend over coffee, and "enviar" feels a touch more neutral or professional, the kind of verb you'd use in a work email. That small gap in tone matters a lot once you start writing full emails instead of isolated phrases, which is exactly the topic of the next few sections.

How to say your email address out loud in Portuguese

Reading an email address aloud is one of those small, practical skills that never gets taught directly, and then you're stuck slowly spelling your own address letter by letter over a bad phone connection. The @ symbol is called "arroba" in Portuguese, a word that originally meant a unit of weight and got reused for the at-sign, the same way Spanish reused its own "arroba" for the same purpose. The Cambridge Portuguese-English dictionary entry for arroba confirms both meanings, and if you're curious how a weight-unit turned into a keyboard symbol, Wikipedia's article on the at sign and its more focused arroba article both cover the history in more depth than you probably need for everyday conversation, but they're a fun rabbit hole if you like that kind of thing.

The dot is "ponto." So an email address like "joao.silva@gmail.com" gets read aloud as: "joão ponto silva arroba gmail ponto com." You say each part the way you'd expect: letter names for anything spelled out, "ponto" for every period, and "arroba" for the @ sign. If a Brazilian coworker asks for your email over the phone, you might hear them repeat it back to confirm it, something like this:

"Então, é j-o-a-o ponto silva, arroba, g-mail, ponto, com. Confere?" ("So, it's j-o-a-o dot silva, at, gmail, dot, com. Does that check out?")

If letter names in Portuguese are still new to you, working through a resource on how to spell in Portuguese will make this whole process much smoother, since spelling out an email address is really just applying an alphabet you already half know to a new, very practical situation. And if the address includes numbers, a quick refresher on numbers in Portuguese rounds out everything you need to give your email address confidently over a phone call, no typing required, no awkward pauses while you translate a digit in your head.

Formal email salutations in Portuguese

Once you know the vocabulary, the next question is how to open a formal email the right way. Portuguese has a fairly small, well-defined set of standard formal greetings, and picking the right one depends mostly on whether you already know the recipient's name.

Notice the "(a)" ending on words like "Prezado(a)" and "Caro(a)": Portuguese adjectives agree with gender, so you'd write "Prezada Senhora" when writing to a woman and "Prezado Senhor" when writing to a man, or use "Prezado(a)" in writing when you genuinely don't know who will read the message. After the salutation, Portuguese convention puts a comma, then a blank line before the body starts, basically the same layout you'd expect in a formal English letter. Tandem's guide to starting and finishing an email in Portuguese walks through this structure step by step, and portugueselearn.com has a detailed breakdown of polite emails for common situations if you want more worked examples across different scenarios.

Formal opening lines for the body of the email

After the salutation, most formal Portuguese emails use a short, polite line before getting into the actual request. These lines do a lot of quiet social work: they signal that you respect the reader's time even while you're about to ask something of them, softening the landing before the main point.

These openers are somewhat interchangeable, but "Espero que esteja bem" is the safest, most neutral choice for nearly any formal context, whether you're writing to a company, a landlord, or a professor you've never met. portugueselearn.com's post on polite emails and Talkpal's guide to writing a formal email in Portuguese both give a fuller list of variations if you want more options for slightly different tones and levels of urgency.

Formal closings and sign-offs

The closing line matters just as much as the opening one, and mismatching the two is one of the fastest ways to make an otherwise well-written formal email sound off. If you open with "Prezado Senhor," you close with something equally formal, never with "Beijos," the same way you wouldn't open an English letter with "Dear Sir" and sign it "Love, always."

Portuguese convention puts a comma after the closing word, then your name on the next line, matching English practice almost exactly: "Atenciosamente," followed by "João Silva" on the line below. blogs.transparent.com's guide to greetings and sign-offs and the two Elon.io grammar guides, one for Portugal and one for Brazil, both lay out these formulas in more detail, with extra sample phrases you can mix and match depending on the exact tone you're going for.

A full sample formal email in Portuguese

Here's a realistic scenario: you're writing to a company about a job opening you saw posted online. Read it in Portuguese first, then check the English translation underneath, line by line.

Portuguese:

Prezada Senhora,

Espero que esteja bem. Escrevo para manifestar meu interesse na vaga de assistente administrativo, publicada no site da empresa em 10 de setembro.

Tenho experiência de dois anos na área e acredito que meu perfil se encaixa bem com o que vocês procuram. Em anexo, envio meu currículo com mais detalhes sobre minha trajetória profissional.

Fico à disposição para uma conversa quando for conveniente.

Atenciosamente, Marina Costa

English translation:

Dear Madam,

I hope you are well. I am writing to express my interest in the administrative assistant position, posted on the company website on September 10.

I have two years of experience in the field and I believe my profile fits well with what you are looking for. Attached, I am sending my resume with more details about my professional background.

I am available for a conversation whenever convenient.

Sincerely, Marina Costa

Notice how measured and polite the tone stays throughout: no exclamation points, no slang, a clear structure of greeting, purpose, supporting detail, and a polite close. That same skeleton works just as well if you're emailing a landlord about an apartment instead of a company about a job. Same salutation, same "Escrevo para..." opener, same "Atenciosamente" close, just a different middle paragraph describing what you actually need.

Informal email and message phrasing

Not every email needs a suit and tie. Writing to a friend, a classmate, or a close colleague calls for a completely different set of openers and sign-offs, and using the formal versions in that context would actually feel a little cold or oddly distant, like reading a legal notice from someone you grab lunch with every week.

A quick note on that last row, since it trips up a lot of English speakers: "beijos" and "beijinhos" carry no romantic weight in Portuguese the way "kisses" might feel loaded in English. They're closer to how you might casually sign off a text to a friend with "xx." If you're curious how that affectionate but platonic tone compares to something actually romantic, it's worth checking out how to say "I love you" in Portuguese, which sits on a completely different, much more serious rung of the same ladder. Talkpal's guide on how to sign off an email in Portuguese breaks down more of these nuances, including how Brazil tends to run warmer and more casual in everyday professional exchanges, while Portugal tends to hold onto a semi-formal tone a bit longer, even among colleagues who know each other well.

A full sample informal email in Portuguese

Here's what a casual email to a friend looks like, in this case someone writing to a friend about weekend plans.

Portuguese:

Oi, tudo bem? Faz tempo que a gente não se fala!

Queria saber se você topa vir pra praia no sábado. Um grupo vai se encontrar de manhã, lá pelas 9h, e a gente pensou em levar um lanche pra todo mundo. Me avisa se você consegue ir, assim já reservo um lugar bom na areia pra gente.

Beijos, e espero te ver lá! Ana

English translation:

Hi, how are you? It's been a while since we talked!

I wanted to know if you're up for coming to the beach on Saturday. A group is meeting in the morning, around 9am, and we were thinking of bringing snacks for everyone. Let me know if you can make it, so I can grab us a good spot on the sand.

Kisses, and I hope to see you there! Ana

Same skeleton as the formal version: greeting, purpose, detail, sign-off. But every piece of it is looser, warmer, and closer to how the person would actually talk out loud if you ran into them on the street instead of writing to them.

Business email etiquette in Brazil (and a note on Portugal)

Getting the vocabulary and grammar right is only half the job. Business culture shapes how a Portuguese email actually lands with the person reading it, and Brazil in particular runs on relationships more than most English speakers expect from a "professional" context. Brazilian business culture tends to be relationship-driven: people generally prefer to know who they're working with on a personal level before diving fully into a transaction, and they often favor a phone call or a face-to-face conversation over a cold email whenever the relationship allows it, according to The Translation Company's overview of business etiquette in Brazil and Wide Brasil's guide to business culture and etiquette. That warmth shows up in email too: a little small talk before the request, a friendly closing line, maybe even a "Tudo bem?" tucked into an otherwise professional message, is normal and expected rather than seen as unprofessional.

That said, Brazilians are also firm and precise once things move into contracts and legal detail, so don't mistake the warm tone for a lack of seriousness underneath it. A well-structured Brazilian business email usually has a subject line that names the actual topic or action needed, opens at the right formality level for the relationship, puts the main request near the top of the message rather than burying it in paragraph four, and closes with a clear next step, according to Pimsleur's rundown of Brazilian Portuguese business phrases and etiquette and Happy Portuguese's guide to writing professional emails. Kaiwa's guide to Portuguese business etiquette covers Portugal alongside Brazil and notes that Portuguese business culture, while still warm by broader European standards, tends to hold formality a touch longer into a working relationship than Brazilian culture typically does.

Exclamation points deserve a special mention here, because they're one of the easiest tells of a non-native email. Brazilian professional writing does use them, but sparingly. Overusing exclamation points in a work email can come across as overly emotional or unpolished rather than friendly, per Language Services Direct's guide to writing business emails the Brazilian Portuguese way. One well-placed "Obrigado!" at the end of a request reads as warm and genuine. Three exclamation points scattered through one paragraph reads as scattered and a little unsure of itself. On timing, responding to a professional email within roughly 24 to 48 hours is generally seen as respectful and professional in Brazilian business culture, the same rough window you'd expect in most English-speaking workplaces, so there's no need to overthink the response clock too much beyond that.

If you're sending someone congratulations inside a work email, say on a promotion or a project win, the phrase you want is covered in our guide to congratulations in Portuguese, and if you want to describe something as going smoothly or well in that same email, very good in Portuguese covers exactly that kind of everyday positive phrase you'll reach for constantly once you start writing real messages instead of practice sentences. And if a project timeline or meeting date comes up, which it almost always does in a business email, a quick look at days of the week in Portuguese and months in Portuguese will save you from having to stop mid-sentence to look up "Thursday" or "October."

Common mistakes English speakers make writing emails in Portuguese

A few patterns show up again and again when English speakers write their first Portuguese emails, and almost all of them come from translating English habits word for word instead of matching Portuguese ones.

The first is skipping the small talk entirely. English business email culture often jumps straight to the point: "Hi, following up on X." A Portuguese email, especially in Brazil, usually softens that landing with a line like "Espero que esteja bem" first. Dropping straight into the request without any warm-up can read as unusually blunt, even a little cold, to someone expecting a gentler opening.

The second is picking the wrong formality level for the relationship. Using "Prezado Senhor" with a coworker you already chat with casually every day feels stiff and distant, the same way calling a work friend "Dear Sir" in English would feel strange and oddly formal out of nowhere. Watch how the other person writes to you, and mirror that register back.

The third is overusing exclamation points, which was already covered above, but it's common enough to repeat here: one is warm, three in a row is a lot, and a whole paragraph of them starts to look like you're shouting.

The fourth is mixing formal and informal sign-offs, like opening with "Prezada Senhora" and then closing with "Beijos." Pick one register at the start of the email and stay in it all the way through to the signature.

The fifth is a purely mechanical mistake: dropping accent marks. Words like "após" (after) and "você" (you) lose a bit of their clarity or just look sloppy without their accents in place. Most phone and computer keyboards support Portuguese accents easily now, autocorrect included, so there's rarely a good excuse left to skip them in a real email you're sending to someone else.

The sixth is translating English idioms word for word instead of reaching for the natural Portuguese phrase. "I hope this email finds you well" becomes "Espero que esteja bem," not a literal, clunky word-for-word rendering of "finds," because Portuguese expresses that same sentiment differently. This kind of natural phrasing is exactly the thing you pick up by reading real examples written by real people, like the WordReference forum thread comparing email and e-mail usage, where native speakers debate these small choices in their own words, or the Collins entry for email address, which shows the full phrase used the way a native speaker would actually write it.

None of these mistakes are embarrassing on their own, and native speakers will almost always understand exactly what you meant. But small slips like these are also the easiest ones to fix, because they are patterns, not vocabulary gaps. Once you notice that you tend to skip the warm-up line, or that you default to formal salutations out of habit even with people you know well, you can catch yourself the next time and adjust before you hit send. Reading a handful of real Portuguese emails, from a newsletter, a customer service reply, or a message from a Brazilian friend, will teach you more about these patterns in an afternoon than any single rule in this guide.

Why speaking practice matters even for something as "written" as email

Here's the thing about email phrases: knowing them on a page is not the same as being able to use them. A real email exchange almost never happens in a vacuum. You get a reply, then a phone call gets scheduled to "just talk it through," or you run into the person at a coffee shop and they say "Ah, recebi seu email!" (Oh, I got your email!), and suddenly you're in an actual spoken conversation, expected to greet them, ask how they've been, and hold up your end of the small talk that an email can never fully replace on its own.

That's exactly where reading through translation lists starts to run out of road. You can memorize "Espero que esteja bem" perfectly on paper and still freeze the first time someone says it back to you out loud, at real speed, with real intonation you weren't expecting. Comfort with the spoken layer, greeting someone naturally, asking how are you in Portuguese, knowing when to use a casual "Oi" versus a more careful good morning in Portuguese, saying a warm goodbye in Portuguese at the end of the call, is what makes the written side actually usable in real life instead of staying a script you silently read off a page.

If is Portuguese hard to learn is a question that's been sitting in the back of your mind, the honest answer is that the writing side, the vocabulary, the grammar, email templates like the ones above, tends to be the easier half for most learners. The harder, more valuable half is building the reflex to speak without translating in your head first, word by word, and that reflex only comes from actually talking, out loud, again and again, until it stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like just talking. Plenty of people build that reflex for free with consistent daily practice, and our own guide to how to learn Portuguese for free rounds up ways to start without spending anything at all, while a piece like how I learned Portuguese walks through what that process can actually look like day to day, mistakes and all. If you ever get the chance to practice somewhere the language surrounds you, our guide on learning Brazilian Portuguese in Brazil is worth a read too, since nothing accelerates the spoken side faster than being forced to use it.

This is the whole idea behind Comigo: instead of tapping through flashcards and silently reading translation pairs, you talk out loud from your first lesson, with a capybara companion named Capy walking you through mini games and real conversation practice built around speaking, not just recognizing words on a screen.

Frequently asked questions

How do you say "email" in Portuguese? The word is "e-mail" (with a hyphen) or "email" (without one). Both spellings are correct and widely used in Brazil and in Portugal, and both are pronounced close to the English word you already know.

What is "correio eletrônico"? "Correio eletrônico" ("correio electrónico" in Portugal) literally means "electronic mail." It's the formal, technical term you'll see in legal or official writing, but almost nobody uses it in everyday speech or casual writing. Stick with "email" or "e-mail" for normal, everyday use.

Is email masculine or feminine in Portuguese? Masculine. You say "o email" or "o e-mail," never "a email." Any adjective describing it also takes the masculine form, as in "um email urgente" (an urgent email).

What is the plural of email in Portuguese? "Emails" or "e-mails." Portuguese simply adds an "s" to make loanwords like this plural, with no accent mark needed and no irregular form to memorize, unlike some native Portuguese nouns.

How do you say "send me an email" in Portuguese? "Me manda um email" is the casual version, common between friends or relaxed coworkers. "Envie-me um email, por favor" is the more formal, polite version, closer to what you'd write to someone you don't know well. For more on that word "please" itself, see our guide to please in Portuguese.

What does "CC" mean in a Portuguese email? The same thing it means in English: carbon copy, sending a copy of the email to someone beyond the main recipient. In Portuguese it's written the same way, "CC," or spelled out as "com cópia." "BCC" becomes "CCO," short for "cópia oculta," meaning "hidden copy."

How do you sign off a formal email in Portuguese? "Atenciosamente" is the safest, most common formal closing, roughly equivalent to "Sincerely" or "Kind regards" in English. "Cordialmente" and "Respeitosamente" are also formal options, with "Respeitosamente" reserved for writing to someone in a clear position of authority over you.

What's the difference between "e-mail" and "email" in Portuguese? There's no meaningful difference in meaning, only in spelling. "E-mail" with the hyphen tends to show up more in careful, edited, or traditional writing, while "email" without the hyphen dominates everyday texting and casual writing. Neither spelling is wrong, and the safest approach is to match whichever one the person you're writing to already uses in their own messages.

How do you say your email address out loud in Portuguese? Say each letter or word as it appears, use "arroba" for the @ symbol, and "ponto" for every dot. For example, "joao.silva@gmail.com" becomes "joão ponto silva, arroba, gmail, ponto, com," read out slowly enough for the other person to write it down.

Is it rude to skip small talk in a Brazilian business email? Not rude exactly, but it can come across as unusually cold or abrupt. A short, warm line at the start, something like "Espero que esteja bem," is standard practice in Brazilian professional writing and signals basic courtesy before you get to the actual request.

Learning to write "email" correctly, pick the right salutation, and close a message with the right amount of warmth is a real, useful skill on its own, the kind of thing that makes you sound like you actually know the language rather than a phrasebook. But it's worth remembering that every one of those written phrases started life as something a Brazilian or Portuguese speaker actually says out loud first, in a meeting, on the phone, or standing at a doorway saying goodbye. If your own vocabulary building, whether it's everyday words like water in Portuguese or the email phrases in this guide, has mostly happened through reading and typing, spend some real time actually speaking it too, the same words, the same sentences, just said out loud instead of read silently. That's the fastest way to make a phrase like "Espero que esteja bem" feel like your own words instead of something you looked up, and it's exactly what Comigo is built to help you practice, one real conversation at a time.