to consider the idea of asking friends who spam me regularly to remove me from their list of contacts?

[Chandra]

My turn for a bashing...

I hate spam, and have the deep belief that selecting all your e-mail address on your contacts list before clicking on the "Forward" e mail button is a supreme act of disrespect to the individuality of your contacts. And a foolish action that may only be expected of the younger than 16 yrs old

I rely on my e-mail to keep contact with people back at my country, to do most of my work and I frankly hate to thread in so much unsolicited-unpersonalised messages from people I have not seen in years.

What do I care if they think that a good woman is that who quietly does her job as a mother and wife without expecting anything in return?? (I feel to reply to those with the words RESPECT YOURSELF WOMAN! AND GET THE RECOGNITION YOU SO DESERVE!). Jokes that are totally out of target (do I really want to hear racist jokes? when I myself have been a victim?????). Nothing gets me nearer to renounce to my faith and become an atheist than the religious chains; and the "XXXXX wants to add you to her birthday calendar'... Do people ever realise these are scams to build up mailing lists that are later sold to companies to send you more spam?????

I have being so loaded with spam that I have taken the step of creating new e-mail accounts to get on top of that, but as soon as I'm included in one of those forward to everyone inconsiderate e-mails, I start getting offers to buy everything, from Drugzzz on line, to methods to extend body parts I simply don't have!

I don't mind a good joke or thought provided the sender had taken the time to decide I might like it, but it's the forward to all thing that really gets me!

I have only asked three persons to not include me in general forwardings, one understood my point no problems, the other 2 were so deeply offended I have not heard of them either by e-mail or in RL ever since and I did my best not to be rude.

Does anybody feels the same as I do?

Off to disconnect the CAT facility before I get inundated with the response I deserve! p

I agree 100% with you.

"If you do not send this email to 10 zillion people in the next 3 seconds you will never have a happy, healthy relationship again"

Delete, block and delete.

How can people believe that rubish???

but glad to hear I'm not the only one!

When I was single I used to chat to a bloke on MSN.

Fairly innocent chats, he lived in Newport not far from me. He asked me out, I considered it then declined. A few weeks later he admitted that he was married, one son and another on the way.

I deleted and blocked him pretty damn quick.

But he still had my hotmail email address. A few weeks ago I had an email from him saying

"Hi, hope all is well just thought I'd say hi"

He had cc'd it to about, oooh, 100 other girls. Most with email addresses like [email protected]

So I replied all, saying "oh dear Ian, don't think your wife would be happy with you sending mail to all these girls"

Agree with you Chandra. And the people who were hacked off by your perfectly reasonable request are clearly weirdos who value offers of penis enlargements more than their real life friends.

I haven't had it as badly as you describe Chandra, that would be annoying.

I vaguely knew a mum at school and she had my email address once for something quite mundane.

For ever after she used to do this with pictures of her children and the pictures always had twee headings.

All very interesting if you're part of the family but the list of people that it got sent to was huge.

It was bizarre - like they felt that we all really needed to see this to enrich our lives. It seems to have stopped now. I think dh may have blocked it.

Oh yes... the family thing... we knew some people who had a very smug family journal who they forwarded to EVERYONE on their contact list... they stopped doing it and set a blog the they they realised that it was circulating in the mailing lists of their former University (a university that has more than 100,000 students!!!! )

How would you word a message?

i once told a friend of mine that i didn't want to get chain mail type emails. i never heard from her again. no great loss.

i agree it is really irritating. if you want to keep those friends, i'd probably speak to them rather than mail, otherwise, offend away! as long as they stop emailing you.

I send on one or two things to people I think might appreciate them, but very rarely. I NEVER go in for the chain mail things.

My brother sends me loads of crap that I just delete without looking at. However as it is the only contact I ever have with him I don't want to ask him to refrain from sending me these things as then I wouldn't know that he was still alive.

My email address, although hotmail, is quite bizarre and not a name so I never used to get much junk mail. However now I get all the bank phishing ones, ones from royalty in some African continent wanting you to hold their treasure in your bank account and all you have to do is give them your bank details and so on.
I did reply to a bogus Halifax one saying "PISS OFF AND DIE YOU PIECE OF SCUM", I never heard from them again!

I forward the odd joke to select people in my contacts who I think would find it amusing & who would smile about it. I also like to receive the odd thing & have a laugh myself, but if I was getting loads of stuff or stuff that was offensive I would ask people to stop.

One of my friends asked me not to send stuff with attachments as it took too long to open them & I was pleased that she had asked rather than just put up with it.

I think it's best to ask them rather than just block them. If they value your friendship then they will be fine, no problem & only send you proper emails rather than forwards.

I agree actually. If someone asked me not to send attachments I wouldn't get offended, I'd be glad they felt they could ask me.

rhubarb i get all those african prince ones, drives me crackers i also get the you have one 1 billion pounds in the european lottery oh i wish
in answer to the original post i agree, just email saying that you keep getting viruses etc so can nobody send you spam anymore or somat like that. if they get offended then they are not worth it x

Have said this before on another thread, but here goes:

My MIL keeps sending them to my DH. He (we) hate them. They were usually the ones pretending that a child is dying and sending an e-mail gives them money or some such crap. He actually told her that they were a scam and she had to stop sending them and that he didn't want them.

Her reply? To her son?

Basically that they were hurting no-one and to get the stick out of his arse!

i did ask one person to satop and she was offended
now I just delete them. although my cousens send me some very funny ones.

I think that asking for no attachments is quite a good suggestion, as it shows you still want to hear about them but for some reason preffer not to recieve the mess (sorry, the highly inspirational and fun e-mail )

I might give it a try (actually I'm thinking of adding it to my signature...)

I do have a quite uncommon combination of name and surname but as far as I have learned there are about 3-4 of us with that name and having the hotmail account for it... I seemed to be getting the mail of some of them too!

IE. One of them must be about 20 years old and very popular with men... I get some lovely messages for her, and some very desperate ones!, at some point I replied to them saying they had got the wrong person but after having someone acussing me of having no heart for pretending not to be "me"... I either delete them, or explain that she uses my e-mail to get rid of unwanted attention...

Recently re-contacted a dear friend via some detective work & mutual friends - lovely to be back in touch with her, but she does now cc' me on all manner of crap.

Atm I'm deleting as I'm so happy to have rekindled the friendship. With other mates, I've tended to use excuse of work firewall being trigger-happy to ask them not to send me anything but personal emails.

As far as I know no-one's been offended...

I asked a friend once to not send me joke emails once as he went a bit crazy having got his first email account at the age of 27 or so and he got offended over this - (I don't se him now for a different reason although we're on nodding terms). Now I tend to delete without reading forwarded emails once I've scanned the title - the chances are it was something I read along time ago (and possibly forwarded myself once in my innocence ).

I have to laugh at the 'virus warnings' emails as a simple Google would reveal the truth rather than send on more bogus warnings to all and sundry. If it is genuine, then fair enough.... but most are bogus. SMS-chains are worse IMHO as you have to pay to send them on!!!!!!!!!!