i am 30 years old and am afraid to give my email address out to the older generation these days (people my parents’ age, for example). it almost never fails that they start immediately flooding my inbox with the worst jokes and cutesy animal pics. why the @!#$ do they do this? why do they automatically add my name to their email lists without asking me first?
i have one going theory on why they do this and it seems to point to their relative “newness” to the internet. since all they’ve ever really had as far as technological advances go is tv and radio, it makes sense to draw the conclusion that they think it’s SO COOL to be able to send emails and that they find it extraordinarily fascinating to be able to forward bad obama jokes and pics of kittens splashing about in someone’s apple pie.
so how do you politely tell these fogeys to stop spamming your inbox? yes, i know there are people my age and younger who get sucked into the email forwarding gig, but their numbers are so few in comparison.