Hmmmm. How do you feel about Azeotrope’s projection?
I have one right here. No email, but they take my posts here and repost them on another site where they make fun of me. I told them off very bluntly on the other site, and they banned me. Most likely out of personal shame, I’m sure. I’ll bet $100 my post got deleted, too. It made these college graduates look like 14 year old boys. They took a post where I shared my grief over the loss of a friend and used it to mock me.
I’m ashamed of my Alma Mater right now (although the site is not endorsed by the University.)
I asked a Mod to change my name and delete that post, but nothing has happened. I don’t care anymore. I can’t read the site and don’t care to. And, if they continue their behavior, the grownups over there will smack them down.
Stupid children.
How about following both types of advice in this thread— a combination of “minor irritant” and “totally consume”?
From the people who think this is a a minor irritant, the advice has been consistant: delete and ignore.
From the people who think this a major problem, the advice has been constant: document everything.
So why not do both: for the next 20 or 30 emails she sends, document everything.
Then, for the rest of your life, just block her emails and ignore her.
The documented emails should be enough to serve as legal evidence. If she goes crazy (well crazier), and tries to make physical contact with you, you may need the documentation (I am not a lawyer, so course, I don’t know for sure---- but it seems logical that , if the content is always similar, it doesn’t matter whether you have 30 emails, or 300. Maybe once a year, save and document an email from her, to show her persistance, and the timeline involved.)
And after that, it’s not worth it to you to let this consume your life, so I would use the delete-and-ignore tactic.
Patsy Parisi knows how to handle this.
NSFW language, so I won’t link, but googling “patsy parisi gloria trillo” finds the scene.
An interesting question. What made you think of it? What did you feel as you typed it?
:rolleyes:
Agree. If you’re really worried, print out enough of the emails to demonstrate the length and quality of the history and file a police report, but (assuming the police will even file one) that’s about all you can do unless she escalates to something else like trying to phone you or showing up on your doorstep.
Filing a police report gives you a paper trail in the event she does escalate.
In the meantime, while it’s admirable to be concerned for her, it’s not your circus and not your monkeys. You’re not in a position to help her anyway, as any contact from you to her life, even if indirect (via her relatives, a doctor, or something) will only confirm to her that she’s right about you and will encourage her to keep going. Or escalate.
If you want, set up a filter in gmail that directs them to a specific label and immediately archives them. After four years I’m not sure there’s any kind of benefit to you in reading them anymore; all they’re doing is stressing you out and keeping you from moving on from it.
I really don’t think you need to print them out (aside from copies to give to the police, if you deem it necessary), because if Google’s servers crash to the point of actual data loss, we’ll probably have bigger issues to deal with.
But don’t continue to give her your mental real estate, there’s little value in that. Tie up your loose ends, then move on.
:dubious:
Should the university be informed somehow, just as an FYI that a former student is acting weird towards a professor?
I would just delete the gmail account (assuming that’s possible, as I’ve never tried to delete one) and forget about it.
If the OP is no longer living in England, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for concern that the e-stalker will show up at his door with a list of what she has eaten for lunch for the last four years.
:eek:
When you get uncomfortable, you tend to turn things around like this. Remember, we are here to discuss your thoughts and your feelings.
We are about out of time. I’d like you to think about your feelings toward Azeotrope and make a list that we’ll tackle next week.
“Here we are, having a pleasant drive, and you bring psychology into it.” 
Until I reread this, I was in the “flag as spam and forget” crowd, but this woman is seriously going into a mental breakdown of some sort. I don’t know how often someone like this goes on to act on their paranoia but I wouldn’t completely ignore it.
Are you physically somewhere she could reach you? It wasn’t clear to me whether you are still even in the UK; if you’ve moved far enough away you could still spam-and-forget. I’d really suggest letting the university know, in case she is still enrolled and they have any means of helping her.
I googled “mentally ill online stalker united kingdom” and got quite a few hits. None of them seemed to be along the lines of "here’s where you can report someone whom you fear is cracking up. This one seems to address it from a legal standpoint, dunno if it’s of any use to your situation.
Thanks, all.
The link from Mama Zappa (the Crown Prosecution Service, who would amount to the legal cavalry should this ever become a legal issue), define stalking thusly:
And harassment…
As ‘O’ has never threatened me, and does not appear to write to me in order to make me feel at risk, intimidated or uncomfortable, (and as I have never written to her to ask her to stop writing to me), she is not - as far as I can see - in any way committing a crime.
I have no idea where she lives, and she most likely graduated (or dropped out from) the university where we met. I don’t even know if she is in the UK, although I am (30 or so miles north of London). If she did some real google sleuthing she could find out where I worked - so one possibility, however remote, is that she shows up at my workplace one day.
I very much doubt that the university would care that one of their alumni is behaving in a slightly nutty way, but I may contact the police anyway just to get their advice.