Email comes into your life for a reason, a season, or usually because it was simply sent to the wrong email address. Sometimes email comes into your life for a reason, often to impart some important, at least to the writer, information. Work email usually falls into this category. So do advertisements encouraging you to refinance your house, enlarge your penis or win a free iPad; usually all from the same bank. Unless the email is from your boss, or sometimes because it is from your boss trying to be your friend, these emails can usually be deleted without reading them. If they contained anything important the sender will follow up with a phone call.

Some email comes into your life for a season, or at least the mental season, of the person sending it. Summer emails are usually hilarious jokes and video links intended to spread the sender’s mental sunshine. These are emails that you immediately want to share. Such an email is the electronic equivalent of the sender shouting, “Watch my video of me doing a nude cannonball off the hotel balcony!” Summer emails are always welcome.

Spring emails are just like summer emails except that they are not as good. They are the equivalent of cheap pick-me-up bouquets rather than roses. They are the jokes that fall flat, the dumb cat videos and the unfunny cartoons. Sometimes spring emails are sent to you by people experiencing winter in their souls but are trying to will the sun to shine. It is best to just quietly delete these emails and not reply. Unless, you think that lying to your friends about their taste is ok.

Winter emails are the trickiest of the emails. They should not be emails at all. Never, ever, ever reply to a winter email with another email. Responding with an email of your own will cause you to spin out on the black ice of relationships. You will be lucky to avoid the two large oak trees and come to rest in the barren, snow-covered field of a needy friendship without any permanent injuries. A winter email is a very long, roundabout way of saying, “call me.”

Nothing catches people by surprise more than a fall email. Fall emails reflect the sender trying to harvest your friendship and love. Often an excess of estrogen on the part of the sender triggers them. The biggest problem with fall emails is that they usually reach people experiencing different seasons. Fall emails bring summer people down because they are busy enjoying day-to-day life and don’t have time for introspection and tea. Spring people are still struggling to forget what their winter of discontent feels like. And winter people have enough on their minds, what with the recent tragic news about Michael Robert Wyatt, South African health problems and Yvonne.

Like harvest festivals, fall emails are public undertakings. Despite their implied personal nature, fall emails are usually sent to large groups of people asking them to celebrate together. But unlike true fall festivals, beer is not served. Fall emails usually ask you to send it back to the sender (doesn’t the sender have a copy in his or her sent folder?) as well as to forward copies to at least ten of your friends, especially since you would not be inclined to do so on your own.

Finally, some emails come into your life by mistake. They don’t count. Unless they contain extremely embarrassing stories or pictures about total strangers. In that case you have the opportunity, nay the obligation, to immediately turn these emails into summer emails by forwarding them to as many people as you know. The only exception to this rule is if the emails contain revealing stories, pictures or videos of real celebrities. In this case you can retire by selling the contents to the National Enquirer.