Can someone please help me with this sentence? I know its bad, but never did understand sent. structure beyond noun/verb/adv/adj.
“For all those who have ‘Hotmail’ accounts can you please email with those accounts.”
This is from a co-worker, asking us to send her our other accounts (I subbed in Hotmail for disclosure purposes). I know it should be something like “email me”, but is me then a non-subject noun, or something like that??? I didn’t understand this in 8th grade, and I still don’t 
Ideally I would recast this sentence as
“If you have a Hotmail account, please e-mail me using that account.” (Or “e-mail me the username/password for that account” or whatever – actually, what this person wants is not clear.)
In “E-mail me,” “E-mail” is a transitive verb, which means it may act directly on some object, which in grammatical terms is called, appropriately enough, an object. “Me” is the object of the verb “e-mail” in this case.
I won’t confuse you with more analysis and elaboration, but that’s the short answer to your question. If you’d like to see an amusing guide to grammar, check out any book by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. She makes grammar interesting and relatively painless—I swear!
HTH!
I’m not sure I understand exactly what your coworker is asking; the sentence looks pretty garbled to me.
If she would like everybody with a “Hotmail” email account to email her from that account, the sentence would be clearer if it read: Would all those who have “Hotmail” accounts please email me from those accounts?. The “For all those…” beginning looks weird to me but I’m not sure I can explain exactly why it’s wrong. (Surely somebody else will volunteer!)
“Me” is then a noun that is not in the subject of the sentence. (“Non-subject noun,” is, I guess, accurate, though I’ve never heard that term before.) “Me” is the object of the verb “email.”
Hey, Dopers, is it an indirect or direct object?
Hope that helped a little,
Yersinia
Transitive = direct object, check. Thanks, Scarlett!
[sub]razzafrazzin’ need to preview[/sub]
<nitpick>
It’s been a while since I had to know this stuff, but here goes…
I’m not sure “me” is really a direct object in this case. It’s either an abbreviated form of “to me” and thus a prepositional object or a indirect object with an understood direct object. You are not emailing “me” – you are emailing something…an email perhaps???
In the sentence “please email me your username”
“username” is the direct object (the object being acted on)
“me” is the indirect object (the receiver of the direct object)
I think. Where’s Strunk and WHites when you need it?
</nitpick>
igloorex is right on the direct/indirect object.
I agree that the meaning is not clear. At first glance, I took the meaning to be for people to use their Hotmail accounts instead of some other account. Even changing it to “email me” doesn’t completely clear up her intention. Does she want Hotmail users to email from their Hotmail accounts, or just email her their account information (my take with the current phrasing).
There are lots of ways to rewrite the sentence. One way that keeps the same structure:
“For all those who have ‘Hotmail’ accounts: can you please email me with your account information?”
“For all those who have ‘Hotmail’ accounts: can you please email me using your account?”
Setting of the “For all those…” with a colon announces up front who the intended audience is. I don’t have a problem with that structure in this circumstance – in fact, I kind of like it.
yabbut the change in person (“All those” = third person, “you” = second person) is jarring. That’s why I recast the way I did. Alternately, you could also write:
"Those who have Hotmail accounts should e-mail . . . "
Either way, the original sentence is a turd.
::flush::
I now understand a little more about direct and indirect objects.
Side note. I was planning on using this against our receptionist, until she sent this follow up:
“For all those who gave me there accounts…”
At this point, I don’t have the heart to let her know she needs to study up on middle school grammar,