One of my uncles recently started forwarding email jokes to everyone in his address book. Which, unfortunately, included me.

I detest mass-forwarded jokes; like off-topic "banter" on mailing lists, they fill up my mailbox with crap I'm not really interested in. With many mailing lists, there's the option of shutting off email delivery and reading the list online, to avoid the meaningless babble that increasingly passes for a social life in people who interact with others primarily through the Internet.

But with the joke-forwarders, unfortunately, you have to ask not to receive it. And no matter how politely you word it, the forwarders always seem to take offense.

How dare you reject me? reads the tone of their response, as though they slaved long and hard to come up with the unwanted jokes which, bearing the carets of forwarded emails, obviously didn't originate with them.

Quite frankly, forwarded jokes are non-communication. They don't tell me what's going on in your life, or anything about you other than the fact that you like jokes about dumb blondes and airline pilots. I don't want old jokes I've heard a dozen times before, I don't want "touching" poems or prayers — especially when they insist that I forward them further, inflicting their saccharine sentimentality on unsuspecting friends. And I sure as hell don't want yet another copy of "Life in the 1500's". And take that damned apostrophe out of there, while you're at it.

Even worse than the joke-forwarders, though, are the people who find "amusing" pictures, sounds or movies on the Internet, and mail them to you. Not links to the files, but the actual files themselves, clogging up your mailbox with megabytes of unrequested multimedia.

I knew one person who insisted on doing this, even after repeated requests to stop. One day, when my mail program churned away for half an hour to download an enormous .WAV file he'd sent (this was back when I still had a crufty old dialup connection), I'd had enough. I recorded a long .WAV file of me detailing pedantically the reasons why it was much better etiquette to send the URL of a file rather than the file itself, and then I mailed it to him.

A hundred times.

He got the message.