Have you ever been email stalked? It's the latest in how stalking has progressed as our lives have become more and more digital.
Think about it. We treat our email address "handle" as a part of our identify. It represents who we are, we spend a long time agonizing over the right way to refer to ourselves. Do we make up a cute and funny name? Do we use some wisdom or show how brilliant we are in our ID? or do we go with standard, just MY name. Or some variation of it. Then we incorporate it throughout our life, at our retail online and off establishments, with our power company, our phone service, our bills so that they can come to us electronically. All our family members have it (usually!) and all our friends have it. We use it to travel, to shop, to communicate. And when it becomes threatened, it's as real as having someone standing at your front door, knocking on it and wanting in.
Yes, the "threat" is not physical. But it's your identity. You have two choices, ignore the emails or change your ID. A word on ignoring the emails - it's true there are all kinds of ways to block the sender, keep the emails out of your inbox. As long as you know the sender's ID. As long as the receiver's ID is the same, the sender can just keep changing and changing and changing their ID so they get past the flimsy barriers you have constructed. So ignore them, or change your email.
I've been fighting this dilemma for 6 months now, and I'm still no closer to a decision than I was when my email stalker first appeared. I'm fighting myself as well, my own inherent nosiness and need to know. If I don't see the emails, might I miss that they show signs of progressively worse behaviour? Shouldn't I monitor and know if that occurs? What will I regret not knowing if I can't see them anymore? Even worse, if I block the emails, will it move my virtual stalking to the real world? Will one move for my freedom bring a ton of bricks down on me?
