No reply is a reply

What do you do when someone doesn't get the hint? or doesn't take even a direct request to stop contacting you? What do you do when, despite these requests, they persist?

Imagine the scenario where you've already said "stop, no more, desist" but you keep occasionally getting mail as if no request had been made (no acknowledgment of the reason for the request being issued). There seems no point in responding: the person has already demonstrated that they aren't interested in respecting your wishes, and a response could be taken as encouragement.

Do you continue to ignore these occasional psychic irritants? what options does one have? Especially in the virtual world: how write "mail refused: return to sender" on undesirable email?

There used to be a time in the early 19th C - and a practice that persisted into the early 20th - where people would send in their cards (calling cards) to a home to request to be seen. The person they wished to see could well be at home, but the recipient of the card had the option to refuse the current request for a visit. The card could be sent back, on a silver platter perhaps, to the sender. The gesture was usually understood; the caller retired.

With physical mail, the return of unopened mail was also well interpreted as a request for no further contact. Consider the tune Elvis made famous - and she wrote upon it: return to sender. This seemed to have the desired effect. Communication was terminated - baring of course the physical arrival of the troubadour on the recipient's doorstep, demanding further clarification of "no means no."

But with email, the great virtual postcard system, there seems no such recourse, no such mediation between the sending and the reception of the message. How is a lack of reply to email interpreted? It's not clear. It could mean the mail was not received; it's been lost in a flurry of other communication; the person is just too busy to reply right now.

Sure one can filter out email - have certain addresses immediately sent to the trash - but that leaves no trace for the sender. No receipt is returned to say "your mail has once again been shredded; was not read."

Perhaps there could be levels of rejection: where mail can be returned - bounced back on an individual level. If this is not respected, mail can be returned in shredded digital bits - again unread. But how manage unread? the new mail is highlighted; its contents exposed before one has a chance to think about it.

Where are the virtual envelopes? the virtual wax seal with signet ring crushed into its surface: a return clearly indicating the contents were not even read.

Neal Stephenson has a novel, the Diamond Age, which is set in a more technologically sophisticated future, and where the leading class have adopted Victorian manners (or an idealization of them) as a kind of civilizing layer for cultural exchanges.

"Well somethings lost and somethings gained, it happens every day" to quote a Joni Mitchel song.

In the case of email, what may have been lost are a range of subtle but useful, perhaps kind, signifiers around communication. And that still leaves the dilemma or the requirement for a perceptual shift to resolve something that is somewhere between a psychic irritant and uncalled-for distress.