DEAR MISS MANNERS: A relative of mine has developed a habit of forwarding personal emails to anyone he feels might be interested in the updates offered.
I haven’t seen any that include secrets, but receiving emails that are not addressed to me and don’t include a request that he forward them to me makes me very uncomfortable.
I also feel fairly certain he must be forwarding emails I send him to other people. How can I politely but firmly ask that he keep my emails to himself and stop forwarding those of others to me?
GENTLE READER: Start using the telephone instead. If this is not an option, Miss Manners suggests that the next time your relative forwards you someone else’s email, you return it, saying, “Oh dear. I am afraid you must have hit ‘forward’ instead of ‘reply,’ and that this was not intended for me.”
If he insists that it was, you could tell him firmly, but politely, that when you write to him, you are doing so under the auspices of keeping it between you -- and that you would hate to have to start censoring yourself. The fear of losing out on juicy gossip might curb this man’s impulse to continue spreading it.