I have written before about trolls and the other types of poisonous people that you get that trawl the Internet and I wanted to write about something I found very useful. There are always those who will e-mail you, with either one complaint after another or typically one abusive message after another, despite your requests to them to stop e-mailing you. I found, the second that I start receiving e-mails from somebody who I no longer want to get e-mails from, that the best thing to do is to create a permanent rule in my e-mail for that person. I tend to do the same if, for example, I e-mail somebody regularly and they choose when to reply to my e-mails and which e-mails to ignore – there is simply no point in receiving e-mails from such a person who only has an interest in corresponding with you when there is something you can do for them – so I apply the same rule to them.

Simply go into your e-mail programme and create a rule that any messages from that person should automatically skip the inbox and go into your deleted items box. That works even more effectively if the backbone of your e-mail system is Gmail (who do a wonderful job of screening out most spam as well) because then those e-mails will not ever be downloaded by the programme on your computer because Gmail will have moved them to the deleted folder that you have with them, which unless you are accessing your e-mails via a web browser, you are unlikely to ever see them in the first place. I found, when it comes to particularly abusive people, that you really don’t miss anything in not getting the next 5 to 10 e-mails from them and one assumes they will stop if they get no reply.