Emailing Me is a Privilege, Not a Right

You have no right to email me.

Emailing me is strictly a privilege I extend to a certain few people.  This is because email, to me, is a primary form of communication, on the same level as a phone call or text message.  I try to think back to when this took place; this idea that email has gone from something I rarely-if-ever checked, to one of three ways to get in touch with me directly.

I draw the lineage back to my first "smart phone," a Blackberry 8300-series Curve, red in color.  It was 2008, smart phones were becoming ubiquitous and better, faster and cheaper.  Before this point in mobile technology, only super elite businessmen and doctors carried the big, chunky phones with their dainty little plastic stylus that could fetch emails and in a limited way surf the internet.

But technology got better and manufacturers saw a market ready to pop.  The smart phone was a status symbol for the rich and entitled.  I was due for an upgrade, so for the low-low price of 200 dollars, I bought my first Blackberry (a phone that I believe is now part of a government-sponsored "free phones for the poor" program).

With my Blackberry I became no longer tethered to an ethernet cable-attached computer terminal to read an email.  But then again, no one was really emailing me.  So I started emailing them.  I sent people emails instead of texts (my phone plan features "unlimited data" but limited text messaging.  It was cheaper to send emails, is what I'm getting at.) and that's how it all started.

Now my email-ing has become a monster.  I have a professional looking signature that I stole after being inspired by one I saw on a boss's email.  I fire off emails like thank you notes or to keep the ball rolling on projects.  I make sure everyone is on the same page with a CC (or a BCC, depending).

My Blackberry became an iPhone 3GS, which allowed me to email even faster, but not at first because I had Blackberry Thumb and found typing on the sometimes temperamental touchscreen bothersome.

But then came this backlash of all the emailing I was doing.  My email address was getting around, getting into the wrong hands, or at least in the hands of people I didn't want having it.

It's one thing to use my email address to get me access to something.  For instance: if I'm ordering something online, I need to use my email address to confirm the purchase.  This in turn will result in unsolicited emailings from said-company about shit I don't want.  This is solved by either A) sending a reply email with the word "remove" in it, so I'm taken off the list (problematic, because if I want to order from the site again, I start this whole process all over) or B) I can just set up a filter, where I program my email client to "filter" unwanted emails meeting a certain criteria to the trash or archive, unread and uncared for.

I'm usually an option B guy.

But sometimes my email address with fall into the wrong hands unintentionally.  Distant family members get a hold of it, and then bombard your inbox with "funny fwds."  These are usually older aunts or uncles or family friends who came into the internet age with trepidation and never adapted beyond AOL and HTML scripting, or developed "email etiquette".

I'm sure we all remember chain emails from the 1990s.  "Send this forward to five friends or ____ will happen to you," was a threat.  Or "If you want to find true love, forward this to X amount of friends within two hours..." came the promise.

No one, at least I'm fairly positive, believed in any of that, but sent the forwards on to everyone in their address book, ensuring, like some sickly penis unhinged on the local town, we would all get a virus or two, or because the email would be so thick with glittery HTML .gif graphics, our Dell laptops would instantly come to a screeching halt trying to load the entire 25-page email.

(I can remember back to one of my college days... getting one of these giant emails and subsequently every email correspondence relating to the original email, because two idiots kept "reply all"-ing each other to tell the other how funny the email was.  It nearly made me throw my Compaq laptop out of my third story window)

There's no tactful way to get these emails to stop, unless you outright block or filter the sender.  Reasoning with your 50-sum-odd-old aunt won't help.  She won't "get it."

"Auntie Muriel, it was so nice seeing you last month, but could you please stop sending me these forwards...." she'll become indignant, complain to your mother, and now you have two of these goddamn harpies breathing guilt down your neck.

Then there's the overtly racist forwards from your backwoods uncle who tries to stuff his political views down your throat at every opportunity he can find.  And since you see him only once a year, usually completely plastered at Thanksgiving, sending you endless emails from fringe right wing groups that have names similar to KKK splinter cells operating autonomously out in the woods of Michigan seems like his best bet. 

"Obama isn't our president," one would start, with quote-unquote "proof" of his "real birth certificate" "recovred" from a hospital in "Kenyah".

So I set up a two-prong defense against this type of shit-emails.  I give only certain people my "real address" email that goes directly to my phone, computer, iPad, etc.  In this email, I port in emails from other accounts, and in other accounts, I have filters set up, so only the REALLY IMPORTANT emails ever make it thru to my actual, live email.

Other people, crazy aunts and uncles, people I vaguely remember from high school or co-workers I wouldn't piss on to save from spontaneous combustion, they receive the other email addresses.  Usually a gmail.com address with something that might look like my name attached to it.

There's probably a total of five people, maybe up to ten, who have my real email address.  Because it's not an inherent right you have to email me, or anyone else.  It's a privilege I extend to you, like giving out my phone number or physical address.