Interesting discussion

While I can understand the reasoning behind it (more about that later), 'banning' the word is kinda far-fetched...
A language 'mirrors' a culture - culture changes, language changes. Trying to stop that is a lost case. If people feel comfortable saying a certain word, that word *will* be used. There are more than enough cases where a certain word is made up, and years later it ends up in the dictionary.
A dictionary/thesaurus is what makes a language 'official'. In the case of France, the word 'e-mail' is probably not (yet) in the dictionary (it is in Belgium, but got only added a couple of years ago). I can understand governments demanding their own personnel to use 'official' words: it encourages uniformism, which is always good when it comes to 'official' documents imo. The word 'courriel' isn't in the French dictionary, either. Untill now, either the long 'courrier electronique', or the English 'e-mail' is used (knowing the French, I'm pretty sure that the claim that 'courrier electronique' is used by more Frenchmen than 'e-mail' is true... afaik, the French are the only one not calling a computer a computer :/ - they call it micro-ordinateur). Since e-mail has become a 'real' part of (French) culture, there is a need for a word to 'uniformally' describe it. In comes 'courriel'. And I think it's up to the French people (and not the government) to decide what word they want to use. If everybody uses 'courriel', it should be added to the dictionary, making it official. If everybody uses 'e-mail', then it should be 'e-mail'. But banning the word? Culture, not a government, makes a language.

And about the language-'pollution'... Do native English speakers feel like their language is polluted because the word 'apartheid' (a South-African word) is in their dictionary? Or aardvark? Or all the Latin-based words? I don't think so... it's part of the culture.
E-mail is part of our culture, too.