Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way first – I delete these as a matter of principal, regardless of content or quality. It’s a public service thing, one day when the mail server achieves self awareness, we don’t want it’s young little mind corrupted with this garbage. Garbage in, garbage out as they like to teach first day programming students.
1. The Incentive
Despite how ridiculous it is, many, many people still forward emails with some sort of “incentive” at the end – send this to x number of people and your wish will be granted or you will have bad luck of some horrific proportion. Karma works both ways buddy, and if you keep on spreading this crap, you might just be reincarnated as a nice soft roll of double ply.
2. The reward
Yes, there are still people who think Bill Gates or some corporation will give them money for forwarding emails. Strangely, most of these people are quite intelligent, and will openly laugh at similarly ridiculous statements such as “beetroot and garlic cures AIDS”.
As for the rest - I try to avoid reading mails likely to contain any of the following phrase before driving.
3: “Spread the joy”
“It doesn’t matter how many people you send this to, just remember if it made you laugh, your friends will laugh too.” …just as long as I do send it along?! A pathetisised version of “The incentive” if you ask me. (Yes, pathetisised is a real word. The makers of Scrabble will pay you $10 for each time you use it during the game. Just mail a pic of the game board here to request a refund of your matric certficate)
4: Rythm blues
”Without missing a beat”. Typically found in those “cute” jokes with clever kids in Sunday school. The joke just looses the funny right there, right after the un-skipped beat. Recipe jokes at it’s worst.
5: The STATEMENTS:
“I LIKE THE NEXT ONE IN PARTICULAR” or just before the punchline – “WAIT FOR IT” or “You’re going to love this!”. Some sickos even use combinations like “wait for it – you’re gonna love this!!!!”. Suffice it to say the cringe factor outweighs any humor the message may have contained.
6: The localisation effort.
This is where the same old joke which was probably quite good at some stage get refactored into a local is lekker version. The ugly obnoxious woman entering the supermarket with her twins is now Afrikaans with a Capie accent. Lets just say that a lot gets lost in translation and just about the only flavour left is the Lexinton hanging from the corner of her mouth.
Jealousy makes you nasty
One day when I’m all grown up, I’d like to get proper mail like Seth <sigh>
<double sigh> 
