Email and family management

We have a slight problem in my family. Especially with the baby boomers.

Certain people like to send me email. Great! I'm glad you're thinking of me. But I really, really don't like getting chain mail/spam.

It's one thing when it's genuinely funny. One of my cousins sends me stuff fairly often, but I actually laugh at it. So it's OK; we have similar senses of humor and we will email back and forth entertaining comments about the funny. So she knows that I'm cool with her highly amusing forwards.

My grandmother, on the other hand.... Well, we've already had one discussion about how getting religious-toned pro-American military everything was a bit offensive as a humanist, pacifist and atheist. And she took it quite well, and I haven't gotten anything from her in that vein lately. But I still get stuff from her and other older family members. And it's so OBNOXIOUS.

I think the biggest issue that we are using email for different things. They are using it as an occasional communication tool that is capable of holding files, pictures, words, and ideas. I, on the other hand, am an email power user. I use my work email to communicate with hundreds of people on a daily basis. I use my personal email to stay abreast of community issues, what's going on in Facebook, what my friends are up to, to manage choir business and to inform my friends and family as to what's going on in my life. Yes, amusing and funny things make their way into both my work and personal email, but for me, email is not an optional thing that I log into occasionally. I am in my email inboxes at least 10 hours a day. I have three active email accounts, as well as specialized email aliases that forward to my personal and work accounts, the 20+ email lists that I'm on, or the separate email accounts that forward to my main accounts (such as ResNet, choir and Parker's).

On an average day, I read about 200 emails. I send at least 40, if not more. A lot of them are quick responses, that take seconds to compose and send. But I am an email power user: I use the keyboard fairly exclusively once I start working in Apple Mail, and I type FAST. Email is not some fluffy thing for me. It is an integral part of my job and responsibilities, and when someone sends me crap about The World's Biggest Hug or "RE: Love SPell - Pass it ON OR ELSE!!1!" it makes me upset. Because they've now stolen 5 seconds of my time. It's my time, dammit. It doesn't matter that it was seconds. What matters is that people are not cognizant of me and my needs. And that as family and friends, I expect more of them.

So, a plea to my older relatives: stop sending me spam. I appreciate that you think of me, really, I do. But I would rather you put the time and energy into a proper email, or even an e-card, than you hit "forward" and make me deal with something that I probably won't find that funny. If I want to look at funny pictures of cats, I know the web address of lolcats.com. If I want to listen to sappy music, I'm pretty sure that I have Frank Sinatra somewhere on in my iTunes Library. And if I wanted to read/listen/watch anything to do with conservative "values," pro-military agendas, and paranoid Republicans, I would just go to Fox News. Out of those three, the lolcats are the only ones I am mildly interested in.

In case you're wondering, I do have an email policy. I email people back politely the first time, asking them to not send me stuff. The second time I threaten to mark their address as "spam" in my email. And the third time I do. So I have no idea if a couple of family members ever try to email me. If they can't respect my (very basic) email wishes, I probably don't have much in common with them, anyways.