I never thought I'd do this...

...but I’ve decided not to read e-mails coming from trolls. It’s been my personal policy since the new year of 2014 dawned. And I’ve made good on my decision in the last month when a group of trolls began – again – to pour their green slime into my in-box. Apparently, you might need to have the green gunk examined at a future date, in the unlikely case that the (cowardly) troll does something in real-life and you can use their poison pen missives as evidence to the police that they had malicious intentions.


A solicitor friend of mine advised me to send the e-mails to ‘someone trustworthy who will keep them in a folder’, for future notice. So, I inflict the vile and vituperative missives on a true friend.
Then, I delete the e-mail from my in-box. At this pleasant and peaceful time of writing: no e-mails from trolls exist in my e-mail account. #Bliss

Two female friends of mine in Ireland have collected scrap books of the vile abuse from the trolls, taken it to their local police station, and the constabulary have gone to the place under the bridge, I mean, the home of the troll and asked him or her to stop.

The caveat, 'don't feed the trolls' does not go nearly far enough. It's better not to read the trolls, and it makes a handy rhyme, 'don't read or feed the trolls'. And it's simply done, whenever you get that bullying e-mail from a known troll, you just click delete.

If only there were a way of telling the trolls that you don’t read their nasty nay-sayings. I had been thinking of sending an e-mail with the line, “I don’t read your e-mails, they are deleted from my in-box.” Trolls, by their nature, are usually power-hungry control-freaks, they get a sense of power from dis-empowering you, so they would hate to think that the toxic text they spent so long writing, has ended up in the bin folder. If, however, you reply at all, you are 'feeding' them and they will keep coming back for more, and the vicious cycle starts again.

In previous years, I had prided myself on being able to read e-mails from people who were determined to put me down and/or rubbish my beliefs. I was sure that I could read, reply and reason with them and that if I treated them nicely enough, they would be nice to me, in a sort of 'you-get-what-you-give' way.  Ah, I laugh at my former naïve self. It has been good for my humility to see that I can't change these people one tiny bit.

It's a source of sun-burnt sadness to me that these people, I mean, trolls, spend their time and energy concocting Molotov cocktails of e-mails that are designed to land in someone's in-box and create chaos. But if you don't read the e-mail, then it becomes like refuse that's thrown in the bin.