Gmail Advice

There is this particularly nasty person in my extended family. Of course I do not consider her "family" because my "family" is the people in my life that I love and care about. Whereas this particular person is someone who if they dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow I wouldn't even care to know that they were gone. Those of you that know me personally can guess who I'm talking about. Anyhow said person knows I do not want to have anything to do with her, and that I am an atheist. In spite of this she makes every effort to find out ways to contact me and harrass me. Usually its by simply not respecting my religious beliefs by ignoring the fact that I don't agree with her x-tian propaganda. Though of course if she can violate my explicit wish to keep her out of my life at the same time she'll do that too. So every year I usually get some email, card, or random piece of crap she bought at the dollar store that she pretends is a gesture of goodwill but in fact is her way of showing her disrespect and complete lack of regard of me as a person. Naturally I don't give a rats ass what she thinks of me as a person or if she has any respect for me. And yet every couple of years instead of my usually feeling of amusement at her impotent and worthless attempts she manages to stir in me an incredibly strong feeling of revulsion. Its kind of like when you get one of those forwarded emails from a christian-ghetto-er thats trying to guilt trip the whole internet into being better x-tians (nevermind those of us that aren't). Or when you read a really bad conspiracy theory and find yourself looking at, to put it lightly, some of the worst blind foolishness humanity has to offer, and you feel kind of dirty just having read it. So to get to the point I occassionally find myself surprised that this woman can still turn my stomach with simple words in an email or on a card. I suppose that its appropriate that a show of extreme vice should turn my stomach, however, it seems surreal to me that extreme viciousness can translate in email.

Anyhow I have actually blocked this person from all my accounts but one, but like the slithering reptile that she is she has managed to get a hold of the one address I hadn't blocked yet: my gmail account. To add insult to injury for several days I had trouble figuring out how to block her address in gmail. There doesn't seem to be a readily visible means of doing so. So what I did was I created a filter with her email address and directed the filter to bypass the inbox and deliver mail from that address directly to trash. Which is basically what a normal block does, except the block in yahoo will immediately delete the message rather than sending it to trash. I suppose it doesn't really matter because I don't ever look in the "trash" folder anyway and it deletes itself every couple of days, however it seems infinitely preferrable to me to have messages from her deleted before I even see them. I could one day accidentally click on "trash" before its had a chance to delete itself and end up seeing her name or the subject line and accidentally experience said revulsion again. Though that is unlikely to happen. So if you want to block someone with gmail the filters work well. Hopefully they will create a better block or at least a more accessible one before they open gmail to the public.