OK, twerps, it looks like it's time for a little 'Netiquette lesson. There are certain conventions that we 'Netizens (and no one's more of a 'Netizen than I!) adhere to, and I've been noticing more and more flagrant violations of 'em lately. I don't appreciate getting frozen out of a subroutine by stray kilobytes of useless data being aimed at the iBook I call home, and I don't imagine that Andersen Silva or most other bios like having their bandwidth clogged, either.
First off: TYPING IN ALL CAPS IS ANNOYING. Capitalization is fine for occasional emphasis on a word or phrase, but typing an entire message in caps is the same as shouting and considered rude, and can lead to one being kicked from a chatroom or flamed.
Secondly: forwarding dozens of E-mails a week is a good way to get one's E-mails deleted without being read. I've seen many users put certain senders on junk-mail lists in Outlook or Entourage, only because those senders bombard them with crap they neither want nor have time to sift through. Think of all the junk mail (the snail-mail kind) you throw out over the course of a week. Yes, jokes are lots of fun, but not everyone wants to open ten joke E-mails a day, especially when some of those involve pictures or animations which take up even MORE bandwidth. And if one sends nothing but forwarded E-mails to others... Well, I think most people would rather get one real E-mail, a personal message, a month then two forwarded messages a week.
On a related subject: friends don't guilt friends into continuing chain E-mails. All the various E-mails out there claiming that "if you send this back, then I'll know you're a true friend" are insulting to sender and receiver! Take the time to actually write to your friends. All chain mails are pretty damned rude, as a matter of fact. I've got news for you: if forwarding an E-mail to seven people actually made your wishes come true, there'd be many more happy people on this planet, and word would have spread.
Andy has brought this up before, but I'll say it again: you're not going to get a cool screensaver, or $5,000, or ANYthing else for forwarding E-mails. There IS no software to track how many times an E-mail has been forwarded or to whom, and even if there were, Microsoft-Disney-AOL/Time Warner-etc. have no interest in paying you for sending E-mails anyway. It's a hoax. Wake the fuck up, Naïve Boy. Innocence is cute for a while, but it gets tired fast. Most of the missing or dying kids you hear about via E-mail also don't exist.
If, after reading all the above, you think you've still GOT to forward something to someone, then consider the following: Does the intended recipient want to read what you're sending? Andersen, the non-practicing atheist, is not especially appreciative of prayers sent to him; he at least has the decency not to send hard atheist manifestos to his deity-worshipping friends. The same goes for sending right-wing mouth-foaming E-mails to liberals (and vice versa), Red Sox info to Yankees fans, etc. Do you have tons of text for the recipient to scroll through before getting to the actual message? Some people won't bother and will just delete the thing out of hand, so take the time to edit it, or just copy and paste the relevant text into a new message. It shows you care. ;) If the premise is even slightly suspicious, have you bothered to research it? If you're sending an attachment, is it of a reasonable size? Unless you're sending to someone with at least a cable or DSL connection, attachments shouldn't be bigger than 250KB or so. No one likes having to wait (and wait, and wait...) for E-mails to come in, only to find it's nothing worthwhile anyway.
Get all that? There may be a quiz... Heh-heh. Hey, the Internet's a free world. For now. If you want to engage in practices that are considered rude, well, that's your bag. But everyone else is just as free to ignore you (or worse) if they feel you've crossed the line. It's not like you're a Foo or anything... >;)