Oh--and mods, please help me out with a "more inside" tag.

I get chain letters like that ALL the time. Don't sweat it, Prospero.

"A turn or two I'll walk, to still my beating mind"

Deliciously Ironic.
In that ... As a consequence of emailing it to so many people she's in for a shed load of bad luck.

The problem is, ico, that the dude emailed it to the entire company. You prolly know that, and are just telling propero not to worry about not forwarding it...

In the old days, before cached exchange mode over a WAN, this sort of thing was a pain for everyone. Now, if that happened, that single email with attachments could murder our entire network while EACH MAILBOX tries to download its own copy. Stuff like that scares me a little.

This reminds me of the unfortunate souls at my previous job who hit "Reply All" to mass emails sent to the entire division. Ten thousand or so recipients.

And it was always something hilarious and embarassing.

At a company I once worked for, someone sent out a mass e-mail to all 350 employees, including the CEO, that read, "Who stole my Ensure? I had it on the lunchroom counter and it is now gone!" That would be funny enough, but then a few minutes later, the person sent out ANOTHER mass e-mail saying, "Oops, I had the Ensure at my desk all along ha ha."

Ahaha, my friend showed me once a co-worker's bachelor pictures that were accidently sent to every single person in the company.

^bachelor party

If the sender claims it's an email worm that automatically mailed everybody in their address book, they're probably due for a sharp reprimand rather than a trip to the soup counter.

Something like this happened where I worked. Someone from another division emailed several thousand people at my division. Bad enough, right? Wait, there's more: It was a very raunchy off-color joke! The next day, there was an apology sent out from the same email address. Two days after that, the email address was no longer on the system. I'm sure the guy was canned.

A friend of mine had two co-workers who had been having a couple-days-long email flirtation. When they discovered they had a pertinent work issue, they forwarded the email to another (senior) co-worker with the whole thread of their flirty email attached.

In the course of their conversation, the guy wondered about what another co-worker of theirs looked like naked, and talked about her nipples at length.

He was not fired, but reprimanded.

I got this same e-mail today! Hmmmm....

I worked at a Fortune 100 corp once, and there were terrible rumors of cutbacks that had everyone on edge for weeks. (As a contractor I didn't have to worry much, about that particular problem anyway, but that level of tension spills over.)

There was a "miscellaneous announcements" folder people could put things in like "free puppy" or "cake left over in Conf 12-A". By default it was limited by location. Anyway, somebody posted one of these dull, pointless announcements, but managed to send it to ALL locations. Somebody else had obviously had enough and ranted back at them for misusing the announcements board.

Except instead of hitting "Reply", they hit "Reply All".

Since it was a global announcement ... everyone got the rant. On five continents. (I know, it was my job to put software on the servers.)

It should have ended there. Unfortunately, somebody else ... ranted back.

Now, with Microsoft Exchange, or most e-mail, there's a bit of a "lag". Things are posted immediately on your server, then they propagate to the other servers at your location, and some hours later, they make it to other servers at other locations. Even a day later. Or somebody doesn't read their e-mail first thing. And everyone's on a different time zone.

So people were replying before realizing that other people had already replied with the same thing. And so on. And so forth.

It wasn't very long before there was, well, a whole frickin' USENET thread. Going out to everybody.

It was hilarious, mordant, devil-may-care. I think some people may have been hoping to get fired, just to end the wondering. It took nearly two weeks to completely dissipate.

And they made sure the servers wouldn't let it happen by accident again, after that ...

Oh. Yes, people got laid off. And my Fortune 100 corp, who had hired another Fortune 100 corp to manage their entire IT division for ten years and $1 billion, fired the IT contractor four years early. Funny, that meant that I just switched seats but not jobs. At least for the time being.

A few weeks ago, there was some bogus "scam warning" email that went to (as far as I could tell) the entire navy.mil address book, or at least an enormous subset of it. Someone replied to all with a snopes link refuting the scam claimed in the email. That should have been the end of it.

What followed was a demonstration of the idiocy of the masses. The "please take me of this email list" reply-to-all emails began. In response to those, the (oh so ironic) "please do not click reply to all" reply-to-all emails began. Then angrier "TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!!!" emails. Then people explaining how to add a rule to outloook to automatically delete messages from this thread. All of these messages were reply-to-all. All told, before I started auto-deleting them, I got at least 30 responses in the email chain in about 15 minutes. The trainwreck rubbernecker side of me wanted to keep receiving them just so I could observe how stupid people could be, but I just couldn't take it anymore.