Are You a Spammer?
When folks first get a new computer and learn how to send email, one of the things they almost always do is forward emails to their friends.
Usually the forwarded emails are jokes. After all, just about everyone enjoys a good joke.
Sooner or later these forwards will include the virus warnings and hoaxes that are flooding email servers everywhere. There are the political diatribes and religious emails as well.
Many of these emails have attachments, which adds to the server loads (bandwidth) and can sometimes even choke an email download especially for those users that use dial-up.
Sometimes, believe it or not, there are folks who don't want all of that email. For them, this type of email may be the same as (shudder) spam!
Usually folks who don't want this kind of email just let the sender know to 'please don't send any more'. But not everyone may bother and will just divert this stuff to their spam filter.
If the people who just divert the email to a spam filter are using an email program like Outlook Express or Windows Mail, then no harm is done. But what happens if they are using Yahoo, Hotmail or another web based email? Sooner or later Yahoo, Hotmail or other web mail is going to start black-listing your IP address.
So now what? No one using that web mail is going to get email from you even if it isn't one of those 'forwards!'! What if your best friend that moved to another city is using one of those web emails?
While this scenario is probably not going to happen to you, just be aware that it could. Ask those folks you send junk (it is junk) if they really want it.