April 1st, 2009
My dad recently discovered the internet and has taken to spamming me and his entire email contacts list with news articles that I (and presumably the others) am not interested in. On one hand it’s sort of cute: Look, Binky took his first steps! But mainly it is just more fucking email that needs to be deleted.
While I am on this topic, is anyone else irritated that Facebook emails you the content of every message and comment you get? Almost makes you wonder why you need Facebook at all. Oh that’s right, if I didn’t have Facebook I would go from getting two copies of everything to none. Because clearly one copy is just insufficient? WHY DO YOU HATE ME FACEBOOK ARGGH.
So how do I tell my sensitive and easily insulted dad that I want him to stop spamming me? I know he means well and it is his fervent belief that if I personally do not know the details of every political scandal in BC the entire world will explode, but I just don’t see it that way. I can only obsess about so many things. I’m all full of obsessions in fact. So I would really like it if he just stopped. But I don’t know what to say.
What would you say? If you have an idea please comment. In fact if you want to draft the letter that would be good too. You know I can’t do anything without you.
Well, if you want to do the conflict avoidance thing, you could just set up a mail filter on your end which will shunt everything he sends you into it’s own folder. You can then quickly skim through for the real stuff and mass delete the rest.
As for Facebook messages, I actually like that they do that. This is because I’m not really supposed to open FB at work, however, I am allowed to check my email…
Re: Your dad. Get him to sign up for a blog at wordpress.com and have him post stuff he finds there and promise you’ll check it.
Facebook: You can turn off all sorts of email options. Up in the top-right you’ll see “Settings”. Click that and then click “Notifications”. I’ve turned off everything except for Event invitations so I absolutely won’t miss those if I can get email (say on my iPod) but not Facebook (because the iPod Facebook program isn’t all that great at the moment).
HOORAY!
yes, what Zed said. filter. done.
(I started a whole long response about how I have an aunt who does the same thing, that I’ve been there (tried asking her to stop, but that just made it worse) that turned into a full-blown rant about how deleting emails is actually not the world’s most strenuous activity, as so many people seem to think it is. Seriously. clicking the mouse a few more times? people act like this is akin to asking them clean tile grout with their tongue. whoops, there I go again….)
True. It’s not much effort to delete emails.