That inevitable second question takes this form: "I have this friend/mother/cousin/brother/boss/priest/rabbi/neighbor who insists on constantly forwarding me jokes/news items/religous passages/clippings/pictures/emails. How do I make her/him stop without hurting his/her feelings?"

Don't deny it. You know what I'm talking about. Like everyone else on the planet with an email account, you, too are getting these forwards. You may also be guilty of sending them.

So then, let's talk about the issue of email forwards and the fragile social fabric of relationships.

That was then, this is now
Way back, in the earliest days of email, there were relatively few people online. America Online hadn't yet spawned the legions of uncles and aunts who gained access to the Internet and spammers hadn't yet really discovered the benefits of a virtually free communications medium. Email also wasn't universally addressable. If you were an Internet user, you might not be able to "gateway" to CompuServe and CompuServe users couldn't send to AOL users, and so forth.

In those days, most people communicated via email with a purpose. If you were a heavy user, you might get ten or twenty messages, most of them work-related. If you were a light user, you might get ten or twenty messages a month. In that environment, it was a novelty to have a friend or family member to whom you could send a personal message. Your uncle might be online, but he might be on AOL while you had a corporate account, and the two didn't talk.

So, back then, if you got an email with a fun joke, it was a nice break. You might chuckle, think about that one person you wanted to connect with, and forward it on along. That person, who might not have gotten any messages that day, would see your forward, read the joke, chuckle, and be happy someone was thinking of her.

Ah, but that was then. This is now.

Now, we all get a massive amount of email. I, personally, get somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 messages a day. I've got some friends who complain they have a "huge" amount of email when they get 200 messages a week. But that paltry 200 messages a week is still a lot more than folks used to get.