One of the most irritating things with e-mail is when you get a bunch of unfunny, unreadable forwards from people that you barely keep in contact with.. You have to scroll down past hundreds of email addresses of poor souls that have had this abomination of a 'joke' sent to them before you try to decipher the indented mess that landed in your inbox. Highly irritating, but a more serious thought... Are these hundreds of email address on forwards like this harvested by people to send spam to? And if not, would it be easy to do this? Whenever I send an email to a bunch of people, I always BCC the recipients and put myself in the 'to' field. I wish people that send forwards would think to do this.

You are correct, and you just have to tell people how to do it, or tell them to get your name off the list, one or the other. I have a very good client who sends me this drivel, and it is a problem, because.... well, because she is a very good client.

Part of the problem is asking someone to stop sending you this drivel without causing offence. Maybe a group e-mail mentioning that you had just found out addresses can be harvested could work? Then people might BCC instead of sending their address book out to the World. Just a thought... The 'jokes' are hugely irritating, but the 'forward this to ten people and Britney Spears will strip naked on your desktop when you press CTRL + G' e-mails are just plain stupid.

I have a few guys I've told over & over. It doesn't get through to them. They've got two speeds, dum & dummer. M2

Get Mailwasher Pro and bounce them back, after a few bounced emails they start to get the message... www.firetrust.com/products/pro/free.php Purgamentum initium, exitus purgamentum

You could also block them. If you have OE you can go to Message > Block Sender. You need to highlight the email in your Inbox and then do the steps I mentioned above. I had (and still do), a lot of unwanted emails from someone, and I didn't want to offend, so I just blocked her and she has no clue. I just empty my deleted email folder every other day or so. The blocked email goes right to your deleted folder. --Viv :) Never enter a battle of wits with an unarmed person...

You can block and wash all you like. If the mail goes TO: or CC: 50 adresses, the damahe is done. The addesees are sitting there waiting for harvesting. M2