Politeness and the Internet

Something surprising happened to me a few days ago.

It started with what looked like a spam mail that somehow had made it through the entanglements of the filtering.

It was from "Bernie Jones" (name altered for privacy reasons) who had a question.

I thought I had something of an answer so I wrote back to him, starting my reply with "Dear Mr Jones..."

There we had it. Mr Jones, a.k.a. Bernie, took a LONG time to respond.

When finally he did, his first words were:

Hi Paul. Why did you write 'Dear Mr Jones'?

For me, that was quite obvious. Bernie is a man's name, Jones is his last name according to his own mail, so why wouldn't I?

Apparently, it's not very common on the internet to be polite. (Proof was already clear because he started with 'hi Paul'.)

Am I the only one who notices this?