Do You Hyphen?

I'm good at spelling.  No wait -- I'm GREAT at spelling.  I wish they'd had those spelling bee competitions when I was a kid.  I would have kicked some major spelling butt.  

But I can also be a little anal about it.  I cringe when I see your when it's supposed to be you're.  There, their, and they're can send me off the edge when used incorrectly.  And I want to yell at my computer when it underlines colour or neighbour.  Yeah, like it's doing right now.  Excuse me, but that U belongs in there.

So what's a spelling girl to do when faced with the unexpected conundrum of e-mail vs email.  This one stopped me in my writing tracks today.  I was in the process of editing Chapter 17 of my novel-in-progress, in which I've written the word e-mail several times.  And yes, I'm even hesitating here to refer to e-mail as a word.  Suddenly I'm thinking -- what's the correct spelling?  With or without the hyphen? So I did what I always do when faced with these major life decisions.  I googled it.  (Drives my daughter nuts if she asks me something I don't know the answer to and I immediately say, "Let's google it."  She always goes, "Ugh, don't bother."  To which I reply, "If you're not that interested, why ask in the first place?"  And then I just go do it.  Personally, I think 'Why wonder when you can google' should be Google's motto.)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  The hyphen.  So I googled e-mail vs email and of course there was like a bazillion entries.  (Interesting...computer doesn't underline bazillion.)  I read the top few and the definitive answer is -- there is no definitive answer.  What it really boils down to is personal preference.  I've always spelled it with the hyphen.  But I went through my chapter and changed every e-mail to email and you know, it just didn't look right.  So I changed them all back.

Until the spelling gods decree it's to be one way or the other, I'm sticking with the hyphen.

How about you??