Delete Files Without Reading Them

Dear Miss Manners: The computer age has presented me with a problem in manners: unwanted e-mail.

It is uncommonly easy to copy and forward messages to anyone with an e-mail address. Indeed, one can easily compile a “master mailing list” of e-mail addresses and, with very few key strokes, send a message simultaneously to dozens of recipients. This is what is happening to me, and I don’t much like it.

I’m not talking about e-mail advertising, which is another matter entirely. Nor am I referring to truly personal messages. I am talking about forwarded postings from “friends.”

I seem to have gotten myself on at least three of these master lists, and I regularly receive jokes, comments on the contemporary political scene, inspirational messages, and so forth, from people I barely know. One is the brother of a friend of mine. Another is someone I was in high school with 30 years ago and have seen only three or four times since. The third is a former work colleague, not a close one.

I am sure these people mean well; they probably just want to entertain or inspire me. But frankly, I don’t like getting all these messages, some of which brush up against the boundaries of good taste.

My online service cheerily announces, “You’ve got mail!” - but too often, it turns out to be “100 Reasons It’s Great To Be a Guy,” “Clinton meets the Pope,” or some such message. These people would never think of sending me these jokes via postal mail or telephoning me; but e-mail is so easy, and so automatic, that they have no hesitation in adding me to their mailing list.

I don’t want to hurt their feelings, but neither do I want all these postings filling up my electronic mailbox. Am I out of line or behind the times? Is this just one of the prices we pay for the convenience of e-mail?

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners has noticed this problem, too, and just when she was resting up from years of enduring the answering machine as an outlet for aspiring humorists.

“Ah,” she thought, “people have finally gotten used to the new toy and are now too sophisticated to think of it as a chance to show off.” (True, there are still some of those tedious jokey routines on telephone tapes, but more and more often, one hears a simple, dignified message.)

The idea that the amateur comics have only switched to a newer toy is enough to make her weep. But indeed, nearly everyone who uses e-mail has now encountered the six-yard-long file of questionable jokes from slight acquaintances.

There has always been an etiquette rule against grabbing people’s attention for the purposes of boring them, whatever means one uses to do this. The computer world has been so severely targeted that it developed a specific term for this: spamming.

But until people obey this rule, you and Miss Manners and countless others will have to learn to delete those files without reading them, the way we throw out junk mail.