Comment by ajb

In general, yes. But in the case of obsessive stalkers, I've heard that the standard advice is to "go radio silence", because their pattern if you ever break down and reply is to think "now I know how many times I need to harass to get a reply" and increase their efforts to get through that count faster. So it ends up escalating exponentially.

Of course, ideally some authority should stop the harasser. But you probably don't want to wait until it gets severe enough for that to happen.