If it was private, why was it in our account?

October 23, 2009 3:17 PM

What is good shared email account etiquette?

I just got chewed out by my spouse for reading an email to her from a friend that was sent to our shared email account. She said as soon as I opened it and realized it was meant for her, I should have closed it up and not read it. The problem was that the email was from a friend who uses a shared account with her husband and the email wasn't a Dear So-and-so letter, it was a forwarded poem whose topic was essentially--"Men Suck and You Can Only Count On Women" Heck, I even responded to the forwarder saying, "Ahem, this is a shared account." The poem really wasn't tongue-in-cheek either. I simply called out my spouse on the content and had the whole enchilada turned right back around on me that I violated her trust.

Obviously the solution to this is to have a private email account for private things; in fact, this account was set up over a decade ago for communal use for bill notification etc.. My wife just happened to make it her primary email account for herself over time. I feel it is abundantly clear that there is nothing private in this account. Many of the salutations (even from her family) are, "Hey guys" Not Dear Her....

Did I miss some sort of boundary here?

posted by anonymous to human relations (34 comments total)

Well, I think the boundary was definitely in responding to an email that wasn't meant for you...

But really this goes a lot deeper than one shared account. You're going to get a lot of viewpoints agreeing with your wife or calling her a crazy bitch, but we've only heard your side of this story. This is your shared account, not ours, and if you and your wife jointly need to set the boundaries. It's not too late to start.
posted by muddgirl at 3:19 PM on October 23 [2 favorites]

Did I miss some sort of boundary here?

If so, it appears that it was unstated. Your wife needs her own account pronto. If this means making this account just for her, or if it means her getting her own account and you guys being a lot more clear about what "shared account" means, then that's what you need to do going forward. This was clearly a misunderstanding where each of you had assumptions about how this account was being handled that didn't line up right. Change your set-up so that it doesn't happen again and wash your hands of it, it's not worth fighting over what the "normal" situation is since the shared email account situation is already a little off of normal to begin with.

But, if it helps, I live in a community where there are a lot of shared email accounts -- people got an email account that came with their internet and just kept it -- and generally speaking what I've been able to glean is that while it's for both people, one person tends to claim it and act like it's more theirs. That said, if your wife knew you were also accessing the account generally my personal opinion is that assuming you will open but not read an email that was not specifically to you is a bit of a stretch in terms of reasonableness.
posted by jessamyn at 3:20 PM on October 23 [3 favorites]

Why did you call your wife out for receiving an email? Is she a psychic who can decide what emails to receive? That's probably why she's pissed.
posted by kathrineg at 3:24 PM on October 23 [17 favorites]

What is good shared email account etiquette?

Not to have a shared e-mail account.

I mean, we can tell you that your spouse is wrong, or that you're wrong, but if you get rid of the shared account, it will never matter. Ever hear that good fences make good neighbors? That sentiment applies here.
posted by grouse at 3:26 PM on October 23 [21 favorites]

I don't know about sharing email accounts, I don't think it's something I would ever do. Seems like you should each have a personal account and that would be the end of that. If you both want to receive bill notifications, you can have them go to one account and auto-forward them from there to the other account, so you'll each get a copy.

Barring that, maybe you can set up personal mail folders on the existing shared account, and filter mail into them with rules like this:

IF message content CONTAINS her name AND NOT your name: SEND TO her private folder
IF message content CONTAINS your name AND NOT her name: SEND TO your private folder

This way you can each receive personal mail in a location away from the other's eyes, and common mail intended for both of you will still be collected in the main inbox.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:28 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

You need to sign up for your own Gmail account, and not use the "shared" one again until your dearest asks you to and gives you her blessing to read and respond to anything that turns up there. And your dearest needs to understand that email is analogous to postcards, not letters.

You also need to understand that she most likely didn't have any problem with you reading all the mails that come into your shared account before being forced into a defensive posture after your "calling her out on the content". In future, try not to pick fights over the content of electronic communication. It's not worth the trouble.
posted by flabdablet at 3:30 PM on October 23 [2 favorites]

This seems to me not a question of "who was wrong" - you both had mistaken and/or outdated assumptions about the ownership and use of the account. It's kind of insoluable because of that - you're both wrong. The only response that can make sense now is to sit down and negotiate whether to continue with this account, what it's for, who's responsible for it, who can read it, and whether you even really need it. If your wife hasn't got her own private account, it might make sense for her to have one. You as well. If you really need a shared account for bills, set up a third account and make it clear it's for uses of that nature, and have it forward copies to both of your private accounts.
posted by Miko at 3:30 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

Maybe she's just pissed because you embarrassed her in front of her friend and that's why she turned it around on you. I'm thinking this because people often don't like to admit they're embarrassed and will take it out in other ways that don't seem entirely rational.

If you don't get rid of the account or set up some other system, you can keep the peace by at least agreeing with her that you won't respond to emails once you realize they're for her. If necessary you can use "mark as unread" if you realize you're reading something for her, though that's a little sneaky. The Winsome Parker Lewis also has some good ideas.
posted by amethysts at 3:36 PM on October 23 [2 favorites]

Not to have a shared e-mail account.
This is the only answer.
posted by beerbajay at 3:38 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

Get and use private email accounts if one of you doesn't want the other reading your personal correspondence. If that's out of the question for some reason that isn't MeFi's business, then you may want to set some rules down now that will apply to the future. Like 1) don't read it if you know it's for your spouse and 2) if you didn't realize it was for your spouse when you read it, then it's nobody's fault. Just mark it unread for spouse's convenience and apologize to spouse (that last bit is important or else it'll look like you're covering your tracks).
posted by katillathehun at 3:45 PM on October 23

First off: why are you blaming your wife for receiving an email? Even if you live in a world where "shared email account" is actually a known and oft-used phrase, people make mistakes in where they forward stuff. Your wife has made it her primary account. Email for her ends up there. Why are you so outraged?

I've never heard couples deliberately sharing an email account. How old are you guys? Maybe this is a generational thing. There are so many free services out there, it's not like you have to share because of scarcity.

As others have said, there is no reason to share an email account anymore if all you want to do is get bill notifications. Since she's turned this into her personal account, why are you still checking it? Doesn't she tell you if there's a bill notification? Are you checking up on her? Does she suspect that this is true?

It wasn't up to you to tell her friend not to send her something. If you were uncomfortable with it you should have framed it that way. TO YOUR WIFE. Telling off your wife's friends for sending her an email isn't a wise idea. You've just made sure that your wife's friend will never email your wife anything remotely personal. I'm sure that pisses them both off.

Lighten up about the poem. You might have just proved it true to your wife.
posted by Hildegarde at 3:46 PM on October 23 [10 favorites]

I don't think you were in the wrong to have looked at the email, but I don't understand why you "called out" your wife on content over which she had no control.

If she'd been sending the "Men Suck" emails from your shared account, well, then you might have something here.
posted by anderjen at 3:49 PM on October 23

I don't think you did anything wrong, given that it's a shared account. Some crow is probably still on your menu for tonight, however, so get hungry in the spirit of restoring marital harmony.

It goes without saying, of course, that sharing email accounts is so phenomenally dumb in this day and age when a literally innumerable array of providers gives them away for free that the inanity of this conundrum is making my head spin.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 3:54 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

So let me get this straight.. you read, out loud, an email your wife received from a friend that you interpreted as not tongue-in-cheek. First off, how are you so sure this was not sarcastic? It's the internet. You have no idea if it was meant to be humorous or not.

Secondly, you replied with a snotty remark that you thought would be taken seriously, but the person on the other end may think is you continuing the joke or at the very least, your seriousness made it all the more hysteric. Maybe they knew it was a shared account, maybe that's exactly why they did it.

I'm not sure what you were expecting from a shared account. I agree with Hildegarde that it sounds like you're using it as a mechanism to pry into her life and that you need to lighten up.
posted by june made him a gemini at 3:55 PM on October 23

Although I should say that I am reading the "called the wife out" part of the post to suggest that the wife was complicit in the "down with men" content of the email chain, but if that's not the case, you have clearly earned your crow.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 3:56 PM on October 23

.. actually I'm now only seeing the irony of the poem in the email and this post.
posted by june made him a gemini at 3:57 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

nth-ing that your wife got upset, not because you checked her email, so much as that you:
a) read an email intended for her
b) responded to it in a condescending way
c) berated her for its content

I bet she is much more upset about b) and c) than a). But since she probably realizes she can't change YOU and your attitude that resulted in b) and c), that she focused on something she could change, you reading her email.
posted by forforf at 3:58 PM on October 23

Heck, I even responded to the forwarder saying, "Ahem, this is a shared account."

See, this response demonstrates that you know that message was not meant for you. As others have pointed out you consequently had no business responding to it. And it's basically a judgmental response, what you're communicating is "you shouldn't have sent this, and obviously you wouldn't have if you had known I might see it." Then you got into it with your wife over the content of some poem a friend of hers forwarded? Nobody likes to have their friends bashed, even if they're wrong. The privacy issue may at heart be secondary but you basically are in the wrong. Fix it by apologizing for an email that wasn't meant for you, dropping the subject of her friend's email (not your business and also not important, it's not like she sent back an email that said "fuck yeah I hate men." You should separate your emails (and let her take over the shared account if she wants it, she can forward you anything you need to see) but if you don't want more trouble you're going to need to be able to propose this transition in the spirit that your focus is to better respect her privacy rather than that you're doing it to shut her up because she's crazy.
posted by nanojath at 4:25 PM on October 23

My dad did exactly what you did to my mom once, but I can't remember what the content of the e-mail was about, maybe politics. Not only did it piss my mom off, it also pissed off the recipient of the e-mail. It was really out of line.
posted by IndigoRain at 5:58 PM on October 23

There's nothing wrong with having a shared email account. My wife and I have one - it's very useful. But - putting aside your behavior, because enough people have offered their opinions on that - a shared account has to be just for bills, etc. It can't be used as a personal account. I can't understand why your wife would want to use a joint account as her own, but whatever - that's in the past. I suggest giving that one over to her completely & creating a new joint account only for non-personal stuff.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 6:12 PM on October 23

How exactly is a shared email account "very useful"?
posted by Hildegarde at 6:39 PM on October 23 [2 favorites]

Why would someone share an email address? If someone wants to talk to both me and the GF, they email us both. It's not like it costs twice as much.

My point of view? It's a shared account. You read an email that was send you an account that you use to send and receive email. If your wife doesn't want you reading her emails, she should get her own email account. I wouldn't have replied that "this is a shared account", let the sender keep thinking that the emails are private.

Then address the misandry, if that's what it is.
posted by Brian Puccio at 6:44 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

It sounds like this is a perfect time to rework your scheme to prevent future problems. I'm not saying you're right or she's right, but if she's going to treat a shared account as a personal account, then you both are operating on different assumptions regarding this account.

Some options:

1) Convert this into HER account, set up forwarding rules for any mail that should be 'shared' (i.e. bills).

2) Set up a new personal account for her, return to using the shared account as a shared account (or set up to forward to both of you, possibly with extra rules to forward her friends' email to her account only).
posted by bookdragoness at 6:46 PM on October 23

In case you're looking for a reason to separate your emails that isn't completely loaded with tension...my parents have a joint email address, and it is REALLY annoying that I can't contact them individually that way to confer about Christmas presents, birthday surprises, etc. Perhaps your correspondents might feel similarly?
posted by gnomeloaf at 6:52 PM on October 23

How exactly is a shared email account "very useful"?
I can say that in my home, it is useful for communicating with people who we relate to as a couple; family and certain friends. Everyone knows our personal email addresses as well, it isn't mandatory to write to both of us but it is nice sometimes. Now that we don't have a house phone it has changed the way we talk to our friends, it segments our relationships in a way that isn't really an improvement.
posted by InkaLomax at 6:56 PM on October 23

What is good shared email account etiquette?

It is whatever is agreed upon between you and the person with whom you share the account.

I don't think you guys necessarily *need* separate accounts, but you do need to talk about this and mutually decide on what the rules are here. If you can't decide on rules that are acceptable to both of you, THEN you need separate accounts.

The solution to this:

[quote]I feel it is abundantly clear that there is nothing private in this account. [/quote]
[quote]She said as soon as I opened it and realized it was meant for her, I should have closed it up and not read it. [/quote]

is not to try to figure out which one of you was "right." Because if you've never discussed this before ("this" being expectations as to the privacy of emails/papers/info which are clearly for just one of you, as that email was) then there is no "right".

(Though personally, I'd have erred on the side of not reading an email that I knew wasn't for me.)

Again, you guys just have to talk about it and come to an agreement about what the rule is.

As to the content of the email itself, if my boyfriend had a sexist friend who was proclaiming sexist things about how women suck and are undependable, and my boyfriend wasn't bothered by that, I would be irked too. But that's a totally separate issue, so keep the two issues separate.
posted by Ashley801 at 7:30 PM on October 23

I disagree with the "not to have a shared email account" folks. It's fine to have one. It's not fine to take it over and make it into one spouse's primary account. The mister and I have two shared email accounts, as you say, for bills and other joint things, the odd mailing list in which we'd both be interested, and shared website accounts. We also have several personal accounts each for various purposes. We don't give the joint account information out to friends and family at all (or, obviously, use it to email them).
posted by Cricket at 8:18 PM on October 23

Did I miss some sort of boundary here?

...yes. You replied to an email that you knew was not for you. And IMO your wife is right, when you realised the email was for her and not for you both as a couple, you should have closed it and then either marked it as unread or told you wife there was an email for her and it was marked as read because you opened it to see who it was for. You should not have called your wife out over the content. Your reaction makes it seem like it was from her secret lover arranging a rendezvous rather than a crap forwarded poem, that fwiw, probably was supposed to be funny, if you're a woman. She's not responsible for what her friend sends her.
posted by missmagenta at 9:29 PM on October 23

How exactly is a shared email account "very useful"?

We set one up when we were flat-hunting because places were being taken hours after they were listed, and so fast responses to correspondence about them was necessary. It was relevant to both of us and having the mail sent to a shared acccount meant that whoever had time to go online first could reply. Now we mostly use it for other accounts we share (like our mobile internet) so that the information pertaining to them (and lost password retrieval info in some cases) is somewhere where we can both access it.

But yeah, I would never personally use a shared email as my primary personal email address. Your wife should probably get a Gmail account or something.
posted by lwb at 1:14 AM on October 24

1 address going to 2 people is the dumbest thing ever. Addresses are free. There is no shortage.

Setting up a common address for bills or whatever makes sense, if you want to go the way of shared bank accounts (even more trouble there!). But it would be more trouble free to make that be simply a list which forwards to both of your addresses.

Your wife should have known better than to start using the shared address for girl gossip. But people get weirdly possessive about resources which they know perfectly well are not private.

Unless you know that the person sending the mail did not know it was a shared account and further thought it belonged to your wife only — which I find unlikely given that every shared account I've ever encountered is named something sappy like [e-mail] — you have every right to read every single message coming in to that mailbox. And maybe even then.

Responding to the sender is completely appropriate. More appropriate than complaining to your wife. Your wife can't control what people send you. Not send her, but send the two of you. If they want to send some sexist claptrap then set them straight. Attach goatse in the reply, I say.

I would not even raise it with your wife unless it was clearly a reply to something she said and it quoted her complaining about you or whatever. Even then I would wait until you are having an argument and then bust it out as an aside, phrasing it in the harshest possible light. Then she has to fork her argument responses and you will distract her from her main point with guilt and rebuttals. Then you win!
posted by vsync at 1:37 AM on October 24

You have a shared postal mailbox. If your wife opened a letter from a friend, and left that letter on her dresser, would you read it and respond to it?

This event is telling you that you and your wife need better boundaries and a better understanding of what the privacy rules are.
posted by theora55 at 8:37 AM on October 24

You have a shared postal mailbox. If your wife opened a letter from a friend, and left that letter on her dresser, would you read it and respond to it?

If Mrs. Flabdablet received a postcard in our house's letterbox, I probably would read it, might well respond to it and would certainly talk to her about it. What I wouldn't do is "call her out" on the content.
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 PM on October 25

follow-up from the OP

Thanks for all the responses. Clearly the whole separate account concept was beyond her.. When we discussed it again she wanted to know if it was free to get another account.

FWIW, the email I read was one where the subject line looked like this FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:
You've seen it before, the multi-forwarded joke/urban myth/limerick/poem
The wife received it from her friend and forwarded it back to others, and so on. She got it forwarded back to her. It is this last email I read. So I was upset she "approved" of the message.

Problem is now solved. I showed her how to get another account and she's informing her friends about her new personal address. Will never share an email account again! Best answer to the poster mentioning fences make good neighbors.

posted by jessamyn at 8:04 PM on October 25

the whole separate account concept was beyond her.. When we discussed it again she wanted to know if it was free to get another account.

...

received it from her friend and forwarded it back to others, and so on. She got it forwarded back to her.

Once her private account is bedded in, you might want to do the rest of the world a small favour and send her a link to a site explaining appropriate uses of bcc.
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 PM on October 25