Problem statement. This article deals with a study of an electronic business letter as an institutional formation. An analysis of the theoretical literature covering the results of research on business Internet communication showed that the issue has not been sufficiently studied despite the widespread use of the Internet for business written communication. For this reason, it seems necessary to demonstrate the institutionality of electronic business correspondence, thereby forming a starting point for further research on virtual business communication. Basing on the belonging of an electronic business letter to business discourse, the structural, stylistic and discursive-pragmatic features of an electronic business letter are analyzed on the basis of a corpus of texts of official Internet communication, selected by the author of the article from personal business correspondence with representatives of the Italian business sphere. Results. As a result of the study, the author of the article comes to the conclusionabout the institutional nature of business Internet correspondence, highlighting such its features as regulation, cliché, formality, standardization, conciseness, reasoning, accuracy, clarity, neutrality of tone. Conclusion.The hypothesis about the institutional nature of an electronic business letter is proved by analyzing the traditionally analyzed constitutive features of institutional discourse, such as participants, chronotope, goals, values, strategies, material, varieties and genres, precedent texts, discursive formulas. In conclusion prospective directions for studying of an electronic business letter are determined.