Back then, you'd read your email. Today, you have to manage your email. Back then, you might come home and sit down for a fun few minutes to see if anyone had sent you a message. Today, you need to find an hour or more a day and dedicate it to digging through your email messages, separating the important must-handle messages from the spam, and then hope your questionable bin isn't too large to sift through in a single sitting.

Back then, email was fun. Today, email is work. Back then, email was a novelty. Today, email is a necessary evil.

Back then, a forwarded joke or psalm or picture might have been a sign that a friend cared about you. Today, that email is just one more item that has to be managed, sorted, filtered, and processed -- especially when that forward contains an attachment that might just attack and cripple your system.

Today, email is a different beast. Because it's an essential method of communicating, we all need to scan nearly all messages that aren't obviously spam. On the one side, we have those messages that are important: a meeting notice, a request from a new customer, useful information from a helpful publication like OutlookPower. On the other side, we have messages that are obviously unimportant, the spam and unsolicited messages for things you just don't need.

And in the middle, there's the gray area of the forwards from friends and family. I call that gray area "friends and family spam."

Friends and family spam
Friends and family (F&F) spam is an interesting problem because it tends to trigger all the relationship hot-buttons we know so well. Whoever thought that the Internet would be de-personalizing missed the whole point. Internet communications have simply created new and interesting personal dynamics.

Let's first look at the logistical issues of F&F spam. Let's assume you belong to a club and one member sends out the announcements of the dates and locations of the club meetings. You want to get those announcements, because you like going to the meetings. But let's say that same member also likes to send all the other members anything at all that strikes his fancy, including at least one joke a day -- which you just don't have time or the desire to deal with.

You might decide that the best way to handle this flow of joke mail would be to filter all the messages from this sender into the trash. But if you do, you'll also lose the meeting announcements you want. Rather than losing those meeting announcements, you decide you'll just put up with that person's F&F spam.

Step outside of the computer mind-set for a moment and think. What happens when you're forced to "put up" with someone's behavior, over and over? Well, of course, you become annoyed, pissed off, and even if you're the most tolerant person in the world, having to put up with someone's troubling behavior over and over will definitely create stress in the relationship.

Here's the first disconnect: the sender thinks he's doing something nice. The recipient is constantly annoyed. The sender's good intentions backfire and rather than increasing the quality of the relationship, it winds up damaging it instead.