This paper examines Chinese and French e-mail requests and argues that the individualist/collectivist model, often used to account for cultural differences in face-to-face interaction, is not sufficient to explain the differences and similarities between Chinese and French e-mail communication. This traditional model predicts Chinese requests to be less direct and more sensitive to interpersonal factors. However, the present study found that Chinese e-mail requests are not more indirect than the French ones concerning strategy types and information sequencing, and both groups are equally sensitive to interpersonal variants in the choice of requestive strategies. It is thus concluded that e-mail, as a medium of communication, has developed its own interaction patterns that are different from those of faceto-face conversation.