If the message you’ve received is nothing more than an anonymous attempt to hurt you, there’s no point responding. But a bit of kindness can go a long way.
I received an ‘anonymous’ email from an address outside our organisation. It related to a project I worked on which resulted in a piece of work that became publicly available. The email was highly critical of this work, but was also somewhat personal and rather rude.
Then, as part of my work, I started receiving emails all the time – some of them quite disapproving. As I began replying to them, I realised that, to a large degree, my cynicism was unwarranted. Not always, but surprisingly often, responding to hostility with a complete lack of bitterness works well.The first is that most people don’t expect a reply. And if they do, they certainly don’t expect a thoughtful one. That may be simple conditioning.
Responding to an anger-tinted missive with composure and grace can work more often than you might first think.