Bit of a rant but it is about time someone spoke up for the put upon email recipient...

I think everyone has an acquaintance or a friend that likes to send out Friday emails. You know... the sort that arrive laden with images of Asians carrying a lorry load on the back of a scooter, people standing precariously on piled boxes trying to fix electronics over a swimming pool, occasionally funny power point presentations that contain images of boozed up Geordies compared against 'apres ski' or some moralistic diatribe on how we should lead our lives against all adversity.

In an average week I receive, both professionally and privately approximately 700 emails. I would say about 500 or so of these are valid correspondence that I will in some way digest, act on and then move on. Of the remaining 200 I would say 150 are mails that get past the spam filters of Hotmail and the corporate mail systems which I invariably need to check and make sure some well meaning human has not generated a genuine correspondence cunningly disguised as a spam mail – which happens more often than you would believe.

The remaining 50 emails are similar to those that I outlined at the beginning: images, power point presentations; humour and moral messages. Each one of these 50 emails will invariably contain a very long list of recipients in the addressee field as each sender of these emails can usually demonstrate a wide social circle of people that seem willing to receive such emails.

It is not surprising then that I will quite often receive the same email multiple times, which consequently takes the shine off the humour and tends to expose the messages of humanity and good will for what they really are, trite rubbish lifted from old copies of watchtower.

So... my dear sender of Friday emails, if you are going to send me any such bundles, as you invariably do, that contain humour and humanity and a long list of those you judge as friends and acquaintances, please do not be surprised if on occasion one of your packages of images or presentations pushes me over the edge and I take it upon myself to click the 'respond to all' button and enlighten your long list of friends and acquaintances on my particular feelings towards, in most instances, your trite moral message.

If you wish to avoid such actions on my part you could either put your long list of recipients into the BC (blind copy) field, which means I will not be able to burden your long list of wide eyed friends with my frustrations, or preferably, remove me from this long list. I am sure I will be able to cope with just the other 49 copies of the same email I already have.