In technical writing within this industry, “email” is interchangeably used to mean either the protocol, an address or a message, depending on context. “If user confirmed their account by entering a confirmation code received via email or phone, that email or phone number becomes verified” is a routine sentence that will confuse no one.
> “email” is interchangeably used to mean either the protocol, an address or a message
"email" isn't a protocol. SMTP is though, and referring to RFC 5321 ("a specification of the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail transport"), section 2.3.11 [1], we see that: "As used in this specification, an "address" is a character string that identifies a user to whom mail will be sent or a location into which mail will be deposited."
I stand corrected on the former, should’ve written “system” instead of “protocol”.
As a frequent reader of technical blogs and reference documentation, I stand by my point that “email” alone is used to mean email address quite frequently.
Ambiguity is ever-present in human language, I’d say I rarely know precisely what I will read about when clicking a link here. Confusion between “email address” and “email message” is relatively mild, in fact (post about Kafka from not long ago comes to mind).
I am not the OP, and frankly I don’t believe full justification has a place on the web just yet. Hyphenation alone is rarely enough to make it bearable, and I think browsers’ rendering engines don’t do more than that.
Emails and email addresses are two very different things.