Scott Hanselman pointed out a service that I am sure to get tons of use out of in the next few months.  ThanksNo.com is a polite-as-possible way to remind your friends and family that you really don't want to get all those forwarded emails, jokes, or other "non-personal" emails from them.  It does a good job of pointing out why you don't want them, which is often hard to explain.  Visit for yourself to see what I mean.  You pretty much reply to the email with a short message and the link, and hopefully the flood of "non-personal" email from people you know will cease.

This has been a huge problem for me.  I get all kinds of emails from friends and family with dozens of people copied, and with very little, if any, value.  In the past, I've dealt with them by just silently archiving them for fear that any email explaining that I didn't want that kind of email would be misinterpreted.  (Actually, maybe this blog post will do the trick.)

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Now all we need is a similar service for what I refer to as "corporate spam".  Why bother having any kind of intranet at all if you're going to send out 3 emails a day to every employee full of useless or redundant information?  I can understand getting the information by default, but at least let me opt-out of all but the most important emails.

And another thing.  What's will marking every email as "high importance"?  It has lost all meaning when you get an email at work marked urgent, you open it up quickly to find out what action you need to set aside all of your important work for only to find out that there is a bake sale next week.

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