As part of my job, I frequently exchange emails with a person (let's call him "Bob") who works for another company. I believe he's on the same level as me - not a manager - but because we work for different companies we're not at all in the same chain of command.
My problem is that "Bob" has terrible grammar. It's not a language barrier - we're both native English speakers, and our emails are all in English. It's just bad grammar. He frequently writes run-on sentences, leaves out all punctuation, or starts to say something and then starts over without erasing the original words. I don't want to quote anything he's actually written, but if I were to ask him how to log into StackExchange, I might get a response like this:
"Hi Amy there are 3 ways you can log in with Google will get you there or Facebook also you can with entering an email and password. Hope this helps! Bob"
I can usually decipher what he's trying to say, but it takes much longer than it would if he used proper grammar, and sometimes I honestly can't tell what he's saying. I don't want to nitpick, but this is bad enough to be a real problem.
I don't feel like it should be my responsibility to learn to understand his writing, but I've tried anyway. I haven't gotten anywhere. Each new email is as hard for me to understand as the last one. I'm afraid the only way this situation is going to improve is if he at least makes an effort to write more clearly, but I don't know how to ask him to. I'm not sure how, or even whether, I can politely bring it up to him directly. And since we don't share a boss, I don't think I could try to discreetly pass it up the chain of command to someone who would have the right to correct him.
So my main question is "What should I do in order to improve communication between us (that is, to either learn to read his emails as he writes them now, or encourage him to write them more clearly)?"
If I'm allowed to ask a secondary question, it would be "Am I out of line to expect him to write well in the first place?" I know it may not be REALISTIC to expect that, but here I'm specifically asking about ethics, not results.
I thought that good spelling and grammar were a basic part of workplace professionalism, and that even if I COULD understand Bob's emails, it would still be unprofessional of him to write them so badly. However, most of the advice I've found online suggests that if something Bob wrote had terrible grammar (not just an occasional mistake), but I could still understand it, then I'd be a bad person for caring and a bully if I actually said anything.
I acknowledge that if I could understand Bob's emails, then his grammar wouldn't actually have any impact on how good he is at his job. On the other hand, since I don't interact with customers, my clothes don't have any impact on how good I am at my job, and I'll still be expected to follow a dress code when we return to the office. Nobody would claim that it was OK for me to show up at the office in a bathing suit and that anyone who spoke up about it was a "clothes Nazi". Realism aside, is it morally wrong of me to hold Bob to the same standard I'm held to - to expect him to make the effort to look professional, even when it doesn't impact job performance?
Edit: I thought I had made it clear that this is not a language barrier and that Bob is a native English speaker. But I've seen several suggestions that I should look at questions related to communication with people whose English is not good, and that if those questions weren't helpful, I should edit this question to show how it is different.
Most of the answers to the linked questions involved using simple English to avoid confusing people who are still learning, helping them to learn English when possible, and being patient and remembering that English is their second language. Those suggestions won't help here, because English is Bob's first language and he has no trouble understanding it - only writing it.