The Jesus Forwards

I agree with you. Or I would use them as material for a character in my next book.

I used to get emails from people who thought I would like cute pictures of fluffy kittens and teddy bears, too. And doesn’t everyone get sent the same old jokes 50 times by various friends? That’s why god invented the delete key.

I’d just ask her not to forward any mass-mailings. Tell her that your email box fills so fast you have lost some messages from family so please only send emails that are work or “you and me” personal.

I did this with an old friend who used to send “Congress is killing PBS” and other internet urban legend emails. Worked fine. (I got sick of pointing him to Snopes.com every single time and just asked to get off his spam list).

I lost contact with a family member about 5 years ago after I told her I did not want to have those kinds of messages.

Off topic, but why is friendly atheist standing outside of what appears to be a church?

Don’t be such a pushover! Just tell the person to stop forwarding so many e-mails. Not spamming people is just common courtesy, regardless of whether those e-mails are religious in nature.

Alternatively, (if you still insist on being a pushover) you can filter out all the e-mails from that person into a separate folder. I do this for one of my advisors, because she has a habit of forwarding lots of things to her entire mailing list. I don’t want to be removed from the list, since there might be important stuff, so I just funnel it all into a separate folder. Of course, in practice, I just completely ignore the folder…

I used to get exercised over people sending me stupid forwards, but then I developed this mantra: “my Delete key works as well as anyone else’s.” And it’s true, that little square key, so easily operable with the pinky, lowers my blood pressure and solves all such problems.

Send atheist emails back at her!

If you have any interest in self preservation do not discuss your beliefs (or lack thereof} at work. Even if you are not actually persecuted or harassed I can guarantee that you will never hear the end of it. Just look at the way religious zealots infest these atheist blogs with their never ending arguments. Unless you want to spend a lot of your time defending yourself from those people, well-meaning or otherwise, who feel it it their duty to straighten you out. If you’re pressed, just say that you consider it a private matter.

I’m with Miller….use a filter option. If FROM so & so AND contains JESUS then DELETE. I use a filter for the political stuff from my sister in law. No arguing, just plain gone. No hard feelings on either side.

I think you should just tell her (politely) of course that you’d not like to receive any emails from her. Perhaps make a joke out of having too many emails or trying to cut down to just the bare necessities. I think if you make it light, then it won’t be a big deal at all.

Hey! I had to do this one time, but to my grandmother ( I know it sounds mean, but it had to be done.). What was nice about it, was that she didn’t just send me the “jesus emails” but other forwards as well. I asked her if she could not send me any email unless it was directly a note from her. I told her my inbox filled up quickly and it was hard enough keeping up with all my emails. That might be an approach to take if she sends you more then just the “jesus emails.”

Start sending her articles about Bill Maher’s ‘Religulous’ and various stories from friendlyatheist.com.

The problem should solve itself 🙂

+1 what Chris said [July 2, 2008 at 8:52 pm]

Modern email programs have extensive filter mechanisms. Just auto-delete the message. then when she inquires “you never reply to my Jesus messages” calmly explain that “my email program deletes them automatically” without bothering to tell her you’re the one who setup the filter.

If she doesn’t stop, who cares? The message is flushed.

Go with the filter. Filter all the email from this person to its own folder.

Accumulate the folder for a month or so, dealing with the work-related msgs normally, ignoring the other. Then, after the month, check the relative proportions of the two. If the J-spam is half or more of what’s in the folder, call the sender over to see. THIS is what you have to do to get the day’s work done, do they think it’s fair to you?

That should shut it down for good.

I agree with Miller. It’s basic courtesy not to spam, and you should just tell her exactly what you said here, that you don’t care as to how Jesus smells. If she can’t accept you as a friend because you disagree with her religion, I wouldn’t consider such a friendship as meaningful to me in any way. If you happen to be an atheist, I’d mention that as well.

P.S. – could you forward me the jesus smell forward or post it up here? Not to make light of your situation, but that in particular sounds hilarious. Did you know that you can make your home smell like jesus?

You could do what my brother and I do. We get these from one grandmother, and we edit them to add absolutely horrid bits, then send them to each other.

Or, you could reply to her with a well-intentioned but oblivious reply that totally misses the point of her spam. For example, for the one where Jesus smells like stuff, you could reply with a “Thank goodness we have running water now.” Or if you get the one where some kid’s mom died, you could make some comment about how expensive funeral costs are. It may take a while, but she will likely get frustrated with your inability to grasp the simple message of Our Lord and Savior(tm), and you may be off the hook.

If you choose the second, let’s start an archive where we can all use the same oblivious responses to this glurge.

Of course, a spam filter works wonders.

It’s called a filter. Set it up so that messages with her email address in the From field, and “Jesus”, “God”, “Bible”, etc. are in the entire message, then the email gets deleted immediately.

I’ve had to do this before. I usually take the too much spam route and tell them if they want me to be able to respond when they actually send me something then they need to stop the forwards because it makes all of their posts go into my spam filter. If you play it right, that mix of conscientiousness and insult hits just right and they knock off the forwards. I’ve only had one friend who kept sending me crap, and I started sending back relevant debunk links from places like Snopes.

Is this a work e-mail address? I work in an IT department, and I know for a fact that we’d prefer any e-mails that don’t need to be in the system to be taken out of the system. They might also want to check their employee handbook, and check out “Appropriate use of computers and e-mail” or whatever their chapter is. That gives you the opportunity for the following, polite statement: “With the 4th of July coming up, I was double-checking what other days we have off, and I noticed that you could get in trouble for forwarding these non-work related e-mails around.”

A quick forward to IT or Human Resources, politely checking if it’s OK for these kinds of e-mails to be sent around, isn’t a bad idea either. If you keep it neutral, then you should be fine.

The filter only works if they’re not going to ask, “Did you see what I forwarded you?”

Most of the stuff I got was of the chain letter format. At first I used to enjoy sending one-to-one replies that would say, “Sorry, I deleted it.” Then I’d send back a message five minutes later saying something like “Holy crap! My car’s on fire in the parking lot! Could you send me that message again? I swear I’ll forward it to everyone I know … please!”

As I matured, I began to return said messages with a link to the relevant Snopes page for debunking. Hit “reply all” and add a vaguely reproachful note about how the stupid troll should have done their homework before spamming you with this.

On occasion, for especially stupid or stubborn Spammers, I clip the relevant dire threats from the “consequences if you fail to forward” section and send them (again with “reply all”) to the sender asking “You know I don’t forward spam, so why would you want these filthy things to happen to me?”

I call this sort of thing chain email, and label them as a sort of computer virus that can actually infect humans.

I wrote a blog entry on it, and anyone who sends me one of these emails will get a “reply all” with a link to my blog entry, explaining how they’ve been infected by a computer-borne virus.

My response is always the same – reply all with a link to that entry. After a while, people get the message and stop sending me stuff.