what to do when your friends spam you

I think it all started back when businesses started to have fax machines. People were bored at work, (gasp!) and so they decided that they would share their general boredom and lack of productivity with their friends by sending out a joke fax. While this was a relatively novel idea sometime in the distant past, I'm sure it became very tired very quickly. Then along came our friend, the internet! Now even people who had never sent a joke fax were very quick to send a joke email, for this wouldn't take any effort, and it wouldn't waste any apparent commodities such as paper and/or ink, but rather it would only exist in cyberspace, taking up no real room at all. Plus, when you get an email, it's tremendously easy to click on 'send to all' so that you can share your humorous anecdote with all of your friends at once. Now, I'd like to think that I have a decent enough sense of humor, but I'm sure there are those who would disagree with me, but after almost a decade of email jokes, they've started to lose their luster. Oh, I used to love them! I used to look to see who sent me a joke and read all the funny stories and laugh... That lasted for, oh, maybe even two years. Then one day, out of nowhere, I got tired of reading them. I don't really know what happened, but it did, and there it is. I've confessed. I'm not into the email jokes anymore. Sorry. I sometimes don't mind getting them, but there was a time when I had at least five email buddies that all they would do was send me at least one joke per day, sometimes two. Now, if I checked my mail every day, no problem, right? But what happens when you go away from it for a couple of days? How about a week? That's right, about fifty jokey jokes to filter through just to get to my real mail. So perhaps you can begin to see a bit of my frustration with this situation. I will tell you, there were times that I almost banned some of my own friends from my email! Thankfully, things never got quite that desperate. This was in the days before I had my web email, so when I moved to that, some of my old buddies didn't get moved to my new address (oops) and that solved some of the issue. More of the issue resolved itself when I learned about email filters. What an amazing invention! If you haven't found them yet, check out your provider, and see all the amazing ways that email can be filtered. Did you know that you can have an inbox for each and every one of your friends? You can filter each email by title, by sender, etc... Such organized bliss. Then, once you discover you can filter anything that comes with the letters "f" or "w" in it, especially when they are together, you will really have hit on something magical.
Okay, that takes care of the jokes, but what about the DANGER email? Well, I guess it comes again from it being too easy to send a letter to everyone, but it's like the old chain letters that used to come by snail mail. Those were about avoiding bad luck or something, but regardless, some of these "warning, new virus" emails can be very upsetting, especially to a newer computer user. Thankfully, there are a few web sites that have sprung up to try and keep a lid on the potential for mass panic amongst we netizens. Some of the ones that I have used in the past are snopes, scambusters, and hoaxbusters. One of the better ones for dealing with email about viruses is called vmyths. Finally, James Huggins has written a good page about hoaxes and general email edicate. So before you send that joke or scary story or warning off, just think for a second if the people you are sending it to are really going to enjoy it, or are you just sending it to everyone. Then, think. Is this story legitimate? Where did I get this information? Maybe I trust the person that sent it to me, but who sent it to them? Does it seem too good to be true? Guess what, it probably is. Do a little checking before you click that send button. It might just save you a foot-from-mouth extraction procedure.
See you!