Email Etiquette: Getting friends to stop hitting “Forward”

by Sarah (March 28, 2008)

As a general rule, it’s only people who are relatively unfamiliar with the internet, or who use it fairly infrequently, who forward a lot of jokes, warm fuzzy messages, warnings and chain letters. Judith Kalios of netmatters.com claims that people ask her on a daily basis how to politely ask someone to stop sending forwards. She has several articles, including 5 Rules of Forwarding Emails outlining how to decide whether to forward something, and, if you must, how to do it. I found, however, that her answer to how to ask someone to stop - essentially suggesting that you just try to remember that the person was thinking of you or meant well, then hit delete without comment - was pretty unsatisfactory.

If you’ve gotten to the point of writing to an email etiquette expert (or even googling the question to try to find suggestions), you’re probably pretty well beyond frustrated. These emails can be extremely time (not to mention hard drive space) consuming, and knowing that they mean well or care about you is exactly the reason you haven’t sent that request already. Somehow, I still can’t quite let go of the guilt I feel when I hit “delete” on one of those “feel good” messages that asks you to send it on to ten “real friends”, including a reply to the person who sent it to you (I always hold out a bit of hope that if the senders notice I’m never replying to any of those, they will realize that the messages are unwelcome and stop selecting my name on the list. It rarely works).

So what do you say? Personally, I tend to reply to one of the forwarded messages and say something like:

Hi [friend's name],

I hope this doesn’t sound rude or angry, but would you mind taking me off of your mailing list for forwards? I get a lot of email messages every day, and I prefer to use it just to keep in direct contact with friends and family (or: my internet connection is slow and unreliable, and not up for downloading large email files). I’m always worried I’m going to miss something important because I don’t read carefully enough to tell which ones are forwarded and which are personal messages.

Hope things are going well with you,

Sarah

Half of the people to whom I’ve had to send this kind of message have never brought it up in conversation, or they’ve just replied with a quick “No problem, Sarah” and the forwards have stopped.

The key to being polite about it is not to be accusatory (ie. “These are really annoying” or “Don’t you know everyone hates these?”), but to point out that, for whatever reason, you just don’t like them. If it’s a closer family member or friend (for a lot of people, it’s parents who are the serial offenders on this kind of thing), you can sometimes be a bit more direct and gently point them towards something like the article linked above, just making note of the point that more frequent internet users get so much of this stuff, and so much of it contains false or misleading information, that they may want to consider seriously reducing the number that they send. Still, make it about you - obviously, if your friend is sending these, s/he enjoys them, so it is a personal preference that you don’t want to be receiving them.

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