I think to address your politeness questions, it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language. I come from a country right next to germany and addressing a person with a gender specifier like Frau would be seen as extremely old fashioned and potentially sexist.

So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree the app is localized.

Which country is that? And how would you address a person called Martina Müller in a written document? "Sehr geehrte Müller?" Or is it not a German-speaking country you're referring to?

Even "sehr geehrte Müller" already includes the gender (it would be "sehr geehrter" for a man), so if you want to avoid the whole situation, you have to go informal, and indeed, I have received a lot of emails recently which start with simply "Hallo [firstName] [lastName]" (which I guess is still more formal then only "Hallo [firstName]").

Sure, but in a more formal setting you wouldn't address somebody with "Hallo Martina". So my question is how would you avoid the Herr or Frau in a formal setting?

It turns out the people who want to be addressed by neutral gender usually don't care as much about Siezen and honorifics, so the systems I built usually just go with "Hallo" or "Moin". I even had one system which would go with "Sehr geehrte/r" for people who had chosen a title or set their language preference to "Deutsch (Sie)" and with "Moin" for everyone else.

Moin is not a good way to address your Ausländerbehörde case worker though. I'd go for the more disarming Hallöchen Popöchen.

Is it not a similar issue in the US or UK? In a formal setting, e. g. communication from a company representative to an unknown (except for the name) representative from a different company, I would be using "Dear Ms./Mr. <last name>". If that is the correct way (please let me know!) you have to commit to one of only two genders and sometimes also the last name is a guess.

You could say Dear Firstname Lastname without being off.

Even in Germany you can work around it. It's necessary for a third gender option, or when the gender is not known.

I imagine that it's not France either? French has similar greetings, with the same indecisiveness around the polite/casual pronouns. There's the added challenge of Quebec where casual pronouns are far more commonly used.

There's also the trap of "mademoiselle" which is no longer used because we no longer care about a woman's marital status. It's the same as with Fraulein.

You are right that rules might need to be made by country. The beauty of small scale solutions is that you can sweat small things like this instead of applying Silicon Valley sensibilities to the entire world.

> it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language.

Even this presents problems, as countries like Singapore have multiple overlapping cultures with unique naming conventions. Likewise, India encompasses many languages and even unique naming conventions within those languages.

Honestly, just do it the manual way. Have three free-form fields: "Full Name", "Preferred Name", and "Formal Address". Yes, it'll mean more typing, but it's the only way to deal with several cultures.

Some profile managers or registration forms in European sites asked me how I want to be addressed, including a menu with Mister, Doctor, PhD etc. American sites usually have at most name, middle name and family name and mails start with Dear Name. English is easy because Dear is OK for all genres. Other languages need a different word for male and female people so their either end up collecting personal information that they wouldn't need for the service they are offering or they have to find some impersonal way to address you.

An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.

So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.

Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.

One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when corresponding with them.

That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.

This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .

That's another way to do it but I can see at least a couple of downsides:

1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others.

2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL.

Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason.

I give an example that covers all those points:

Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously.

Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.

It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles. Every country has their own interface standards and it is always educational to dig in to that for a bit to get acquainted with the local customs so you don't end up making some kind of faux pas. And sometimes those standards are very fluid, someone calling you 'Sir' may do so in a mildly sarcastic manner to get the point across, they don't necessarily believe you to have been knighted. And some people use access to their given name(s) as something to be granted explicitly, even though the company phone book spells out their first name and others are equally offended when you address them by their family name.

It's a minefield!

Actually, the stereotype among Germans is that Austrians are even more fond of their titles, although I think that has decreased in both countries in the last decades.

The "addressing people by their first name and using Du instead of Sie" is indeed handled very differently in different companies. I consider myself lucky to work for a company where "Du" and first name is the rule, so I don't have to keep an internal list of colleagues which I can use "Du" with...

> It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles.

Seeing all the title drop down when subscribing to the economist (UK) made it clear to me it is a thing there too, at least in some circles.

Sir-itis is particularly endemic to the Philippines, in no small part thanks to call center scripts. At one point we had a company driver who insisted (quite seriously, no sarcasm involved) on calling his passengers Sir Firstname.

I'd rather say it comes from the Spanish Don, as it is used not as a title but in formal occasions, together with the given name.

> A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person?

This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.

It was a bit trickier in my case because it was an English tool to fill a German form. There was the awkward issue of "Frau Dr." and "Herr Dr." being the same thing in the English dropdown.

The other issue is that the full name is used in the address, but only the last name in the greeting. There are no apartment numbers in Germany, so the name in the address must match the name on the mailbox. There can also be a lot of "Herr Müller" working at the same address.

In the end I opted for Mr/Mrs/Other + first and last name, and dropped the title. It's good enough for this purpose, but it shows how tricky something like a name can get, especially if the person filling the form is not aware of all this.

Having not been in this position myself, my instinct is to drop the greeting line in emails altogether. I’m sure you considered that and had a good reason not to drop it.

I personally find it somewhat rude, unless it's a follow up message or someone I know very well.

To give a bit of context I help people as a courtesy when the information on my website does not suffice. If readers can't be arsed to say hello before they ask for a few minutes of my time, I quietly wonder who raised them. Imagine walking up to a retail employee and blurting out "I need printer paper" without saying "hello" or "excuse me".

As a general case, you can ask for the full name in the printed order as the user wishes and ask for a preferred calling name, in this case "Frau Dr. Musterfrau", then problems solved!

> you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person.

No it doesn't. Just ask how they want to be addressed. You can't encode all the possible variants, not everyone in Germany will want to be addressed in that way even if they are both a woman and a doctor.