She’s a good girl, but very immature, and like many kids wasn’t allowed on the internet at all as a kid (because her parents were terrified of internet predators). So now she’s just-15, with the emotional level of your average 12-13 year old, and recently unfettered internet access. Of course, she has no idea that what she’s doing is annoying or poor manners. I’m getting a dozen forwards a day, some of it glurge, most of it “make a wish and forward this to 156 people in the next 10 minutes and a boy will kiss you before next Thursday” and the occasional actual funny or good link.
I made the mistake of replying “HA! That was really funny!” to one of them yesterday, which has only encouraged her.
Today I got one of those “If you send this back to the person who sent it to you, you’re a REAL friend” headaches. I don’t want to hurt her feelings by not sending it back to her, but I don’t want to encourage this behavior, either!
Any advice on how to handle it? She’s EXTREMELY sensitive and tends to take any amount of correction or discipline as a personal attack. I’m glad that she’s opening up and sharing with me, and I don’t want her to withdraw because I correct her.
Does she include the 3,287 other email addresses with it also? The way I got one person to quit was to send a snarky and full of total silly stuff, to the tune of about 3 pages worth, to ‘Reply to all’ that I really appreciated (my relatives email address) FWDing all this stuff to me.
They had a fun few days with their email.
I also had one I just never opened his email again and one time he asked why I never reply anymore and I told him that I had asked him to learn how to clean up / strip the part he wanted me to see which he refused to do so I had no choice but to delete his all the time.
If it is not worth the time and effort to strip and redo, it is not worth my time to see it. (Usually the same thing that has been going around for the last 3 years.)
You might go at her with the idea of showing her how to do it right and how to be a good ‘internet’ person. She may not get offended that way. All the extra work will kill off most of her enthusiasm for that stuff in a week or so.
Or just do not open anything that has ‘FWD’ in the subject line.
If your email must be downloaded to see the subject line ( bad email client IMO ) you might splain to her that your mail is being clogged up and you can’t accept so much from her.
Or just block her until she listens to reason.
If a nice relative can’t splain to her without her melting down, she is in for a rough ride on the net. IMO
Step 1 is to always send the number of email forwards back to her only. 156 in 10 minutes? Send all 156 back to her.
Step 2: Eventually, she’ll not get why you keep doing that. That’s when you drop the bomb it’s rude to send the email forwards, as you’ve read ALL of them before.
Step 3: Tell her the only emails you open are not attachments and from her only. You’d be surprised how much that cuts down.
I just had to tell my 40 year old sister-in-law about this. She just got her first email addy this year. It’s been a rough few months.
tell her to send emails to friends her own age, because your grown-up computer has a special filter that often blocks her emails to you. ( choose: business filter,/antivirus filter /secret CIA message filter) A white lie is okay here.
Not that you don’t love to get emails from her, but…
Think about how many e-mail forwards–no matter how stupid-- you are willing to read each day or week. Then send her a nice message saying that you are really flattered that she wants to share all these messages with you, but that you are too busy to read them all. (A polite mention of “And if all my friends sent me as many e-mails as you do, I’d never have time to do anything but delete e-mail forwards” is optional). Tell her that you value her judgement, and so you are willing to read 1, 2 or whatever per day/week/month and promise her that you will always read any personal e-mails from her. (At least until she starts using e-mail as a diary and dumping it on you every day).
If she’s just started using e-mail, she may not be aware of the rules of ettiquite which apply. Tell her about the nules she’s violated, before you start a public campaign of humiliation, please.
Tell her that your mailbox has limited space, and ask that she pick the two that she thinks are the best and send them. Build her critical thinking skills.
I don’t see anything wrong with telling her that you hate chain letters. You’re never too young to learn that chain letters are eeeeevil.
Or you could educate her about forwards, that they often have viruses that damage computers and that most people won’t open them.
One of our relatives from the U.K. seems to have just gotten online, and she’s been sending my mom ‘funny’ pictures, videos, powerpoint files, etc. etc. for a month now.
I only discovered it this week when an email reply of mine bounced due to insufficient space. I’d set my parents email client to keep mail on the server for 6 months or so (convenient for checking webmail). This was fine for the last few years, but the sudden deluge of giant files filled their 100M quota in under a month.
I’m not sure if I’m going to adjust things, or let my mom use it as an excuse to avoid the emails.
There’s a girl at work who keeps sending me forwards. Dozens, every day, mostly lame, mostly seen about five years ago. However, she’s totally hot so I let her get away with it.
In Outlook Express edit the account properties. Under General there’s your email address. Change a character and save the changes. The reply button will send the email to the wrong account, and eventualy bounce back to her as undeliverable. It should have the desired effect. Use it like that for a couple emails and change it back for other people before they have problems. It will work.
I tell people to please link and not send files, and don’t forward because it takes forever for the large files to download to my computer.
