Creepy. But I just filed the letters away, kept my head down and moved on.

I had heard the stories of the women who came before me and what they had to go through to cover sports. Journalists like Lisa Olson, who had been with The Boston Herald. In 1990, she said she had been harassed in the locker room while covering the New England Patriots. What followed her accusations was brutal: Death threats. Slashed tires. Naked blow-up “Lisa” dolls tossed around the stands at games. Her apartment was burglarized. In the end, she had to move to Australia to get away from the abuse.

So the notes I received from creepy readers didn’t seem so bad at all. This, I thought, was the deal for women in sports. I had been an athlete. You had to be tough to make it. I could take it.

Men got mean notes, too, I was told. But as far as I can tell, none of the notes my male colleagues have ever received are laced with sexual connotations.

I’m pretty sure that any man who wrote about the rape accusations against the former Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston didn’t receive reader emails saying he would be raped because of his opinion, as I did. He probably didn’t get an email from a man who said he wanted to line him and other men like him against a wall so he could shoot them all in the head.

Emails like that arrived in my work inbox one morning. It was Christmas.

Can’t I just ignore all of it? That’s not easy to do now that news organizations expect reporters to build a presence on social media and engage with readers. Especially on Twitter. In the sports community, Twitter is the social hub of choice for athletes, fans and journalists — a giant water cooler in the cloud where people share opinions and ideas.

It can be a great place to network. It can also be a hostile place. Harassers can hide in anonymity and strike in a millisecond.