A fable. With a moral.

Once upon a time, there was a nice Grandma that had two married daughters. One of her son-in-laws helped her set up a computer, many years ago. Then all the kids shared emails with Grandma and everything was wonderful.

Then the other son-in-law decided to be a purveyor of funny stuff emailed around to everybody he knew. His mailing list of junk jokes grew and grew until there were over forty recipients.

Unfortunately, Grandma’s computer was old and tired and couldn’t handle a funny 8MB movie file. She had a dialup connection, so it took as long as 20 minutes to download a single message.

Eventually, Grandma became despondent and quit checking her email. The jokes piled up until there were almost two dozen of them. Her computer was shut down by joke emails. Now none of the children could contact her on the internet, and everything was no longer wonderful.

What’s the moral of this story, children? When you’re forwarding cute emails to everybody in your address book, one of them might be a non-power user without technical support on dialup. You’d be like a virus, crippling that computer beyond all hope.

Besides, posting dopey stuff for people to read is what blogs are for. They’re opt-in, and don’t shut down somebody's email.