I'm lucky in that I've trained most people who have my e-mail address out of forwarding me things, so that's part of it. A small part is of course that I've established mailing lists for our social circle, so a certain amount of the linkage and so on go to the list (which does serve as an editing factor to some degree, because the list membership is diverse enough that people think twice about whether everyone would appreciate a given thing or not). At work, people don't usually forward me much at all. I know they forward it to each other, but I seem to have gotten left off those lists, thankfully. Once in a while I do get "Hug someone today!" powerpoint shows and stuff, usually from this one guy who works here. He's been on site for about three years now, so maybe he's lonely.

The only guy I generally tolerate the forwarded stuff outside of work from is this one guy I'm sort of perpetually not-quite-involved with. He's really sweet, but EXCEEDINGLY forward-happy. I think the biggest thing is that I have to teach him that I'm not keen on gender-based "humour", especially of the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus / How the world Would Be Different is Men / Women did X / Y, Hey aren't Men / Women Stupid! sort.

It's probably somehow telling that the only person I *haven't* attempted to train out the habit is someone I'm still sort of hoping to have sex with again sometime. ;) Then again, I think the bigger part of it is that it's just so much the sort of thing you'd expect him to do -- such a part of his character -- that I don't know if you really could reasonably change that.