What can you do? What should you do?
Going back to the original question, how can you make it stop? Well, obviously there are two sides to this: the recipient and the sender. I'll discuss how both parties might behave and what to do to manage the situation.

If you're the recipient and you have an F&F spammer to deal with, the first and simplest action is to simply and politely request he stop the practice. Explain the hassle and inconvenience it's causing you. Explain how you'd like to stay in touch, how you value personal communications, and how you have to set a boundary on the incessant forwarding. Be polite but be firm. For the tougher situations, you might want to explain that your fallback is to set up an automatic filter so all mail from this person would be deleted. Or, you could suggest the sender read this article.

You may ultimately have a decision to make. Is it more important to prevent these messages from reaching your inbox (possibly by automatically filtering her messages into the trash) or is it more important to let the email get through and keep an online relationship going, even if the sender can't help herself from continually sending you forwards? After all, it just might be better in the long run to hand-delete a few silly messages than miss an important personal message from that very special friend. Then again, it might be better to avoid friendships with people who don't respect your wishes. Only you can decide.

If you're a sender, the procedure is much easier. If someone sets a boundary and asks you to stop sending junk messages, jokes, and so forth, just plain stop. Period. If you continue the practice after you've been asked to stop, you're disrespecting the wishes of your recipient and that's rude. If you mean well, as I'm sure you do, I know you don't want to engage in rude behavior. So don't.

I know the mind of the F&F spammer. You're thinking, "OK, I can do that. But what if there's this one thing I absolutely have to share? What if there's that one exception? Then what?"

Then you need to respect the boundaries that have been set. Remember, the person you're communicating with is supposed to be a friend or family member, someone you care about. If that person has asked you not to send any fun messages, don't. If you really, really want to send one message (and by this I mean one, once, in say six months), ask if it's ok for you to forward something just this once and then make sure it is only just this once. If the answer is no, no means no.

And that brings me to the bottom line for the senders of the forwards. You, too, have a decision to make. Is it more important to have a good relationship with someone who has asked you to stop sending these messages or is it more important to impose your will on the relationship and send the messages? I'm hoping you're going to be smart enough to realize the relationship is far more important than any email forward you might desperately want to send.

Now go ahead and forward this article to all your friends.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.