So I was going through some really old emails (1998, actually) and came across this gem I sent to a friend of mine who wouldn’t stop forwarding junk mail.

How about you send me only a fraction of the e-mail you get? That’s your e-mail, not mine, so please don’t send it to me.

Secondly, spam is not only annoying, but an incredible waste of time (mind and yours). Frankly, I don’t enjoy these quotes as much (probably the reason why I am not on his mailing list, I’d assume) as you obviously do. It takes me longer to download the mail messages you send me than it does to read them, and that royally ticks me off. If you’re going to send it to me, at least make it something that I’d at least remotely like to read.

Here, for your information, is a short list of things that I do NOT want to see:

• Messages that contain, anywhere in the message body, the word FORWARD. This means no messages like "forward this to 15 people and you will win the lottery" or "send this to everyone in your address books because I want to see how much Internet bandwidth I can waste with this message" or any other permutations.
• Rupert’s Quote of the Day. ‘Nuff said, I think.
• Messages that have anything to do with making money, like "we are tracking this e-mail and we will pay $1 for everyone you send it to." The fact is, NOBODY has the ability to do this. Period. It’s like trying to find out the previous owner of a penny; that information just doesn’t exist. And even though e-mail addresses accumulate in the endless message headers that go along with these messages (often longer than the message itself) do in fact end up in the possession of a person who has made such a promise, they have NO WAY ON EARTH of finding out your real name, street address, or even what STATE you live in. I hope I’m making myself perfectly clear here. E-Mail is founded with the idea of letting the people who use it to hide their personal information from people who might be able to use or exploit that information.

The ONLY exception to all of this is if you have a funny and/or interesting story that is of some mental or spiritual GAIN. If it’s a story that makes you go, "Hmm…." yeah, I’d like to see it. But you also have to face the fact that much of the information on the Internet is FORGED. That means it is Fake. By that I mean hoaxes, of which you have sent me many. This has a lot to do with the big paragraph above, so if you have forgotten already, just scroll up and read it again.

Like I have said before, use the Forward button SPARINGLY. In fact, the number of times I have used the forward button in the two and a half years I have been online could be counted on ONE HAND. Twice is all. "Oh well that means you don’t like to share good stories or blah blah…" That is entirely untrue. I use something called Cut and Paste, and I remove those stupid ">"s from the beginning of each line. Easier to read, no pointless headers, just what I want them to read, and that’s it.

I bet you’re going to look at this novel I’ve written and fire back the now-expected response, "Whateveh!!!" well, go ahead, but be warned I now have a filter on my e-mail box that automatically picks out e-mails with a "Fwd:" in the subject line.

Ah, the memories. I didn’t even remember writing this.

Sorry for the long hiatus. I am in the middle of hell finals week, so things are a little hectic around these parts.

Oh, and the German april fools page is here.