No REALLY, please, stop it.

Do you want to get your friends and family to stop sending you their jokes, appeals and cute kitten pictures (and the email addresses of all their friends)?

I like people to send me emails. I nearly always write back. I also send stuff to people that I think might interest them.

I have had one of my email addresses for about fourteen years so I recieve a lot of junk mail but this is largely sorted out by getting Google mail to filter it.

Sorting my friends and family out is a little harder. Here’s the thing:

If you drop all your email addresses into the to: box of an email you are writing it arrives at each of those peoples inbox with that list visable and intact. The chances are that at least some of those people will think you like recieving pictures of cats playing the piano and include you on their ‘send them a joke’ list.

Eventually you get to be on everyone’s list and you may end up receiving thousands of emails like this a day.

On a personal level it is pretty impersonal to get emails that someone just forwarded on to everyone they knew. if you think I would really like it send it to me. I would love to hear from you and a short note as to why you think this is relevant to me is most welcome. if I think you are mistaken I can write back and tell you and we can have some discussion about it.

What to do?

There are a least five things you can do about this issue:

• Delete the email in the hope that it was a one off abberation and your friend will come to their sences.
• Write back to the person who sent you the email and politely ask them not to send stuff to you.
• Filter all messages that are not addressed to you (and just you) into a folder in you email system.
• Blacklist all the email from that person.
• Send them an email using this service which will send them an anonymous email but restricts itseldf to only sending one email to a particular address every three months to avaid a deludge.
• send them a link to this page, or this one, which both explain politely much of what I have outlined and how to send Blind Carbon Copies (BCC) if you want to send out a legitimate newsletter type email..

Obvoiusly some of these are rather harsh but I have resorted to all of them at one time or another. If you are addicted to collection and bookmarking we sites there are many places where you can share your passion like stumbleupon or the various bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg.

I use the last two options now most of the time.

It is hard to remain patient with the many well wishers who are just discovering the joys of email so do treat them lightly and remember when you first started on the interweb. Spend a moment to point them in the right direction annd we all benefit.

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