I've been abused by my "friends" via email since 1996. I wrote this one day after a peculiarly large barrage of abuses landed in my inbox. See the original at my website.

How to abuse email and your friends at the same time

Write an email following the pattern below and send it to all your "friends"
This pattern is the result of hours of research and development by thousands of mindless email address owners.

---

[Statement describing how this message positively affected your life]

----Original Message----
From: [email address of sender]
To: [list of victims email addresses; length indeterminate]
Subject: Generic Message [statement obligating recipient to victimize others]

[repeat email header above as desired]
Notice how your victims harm each other by exposing as many email addresses as possible. If you are successful, this list of victims' email addresses might be forwarded to malicious entities.


[Insert generic message here]
Remember as you are crafting your message that its purpose is to appeal to your victims' sensibilities, increasing the probability that they will victimize others by forwarding your message.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Religion, romance, patriotism, familial love, inspiration, politics, and finances.
A recent favorite is to use scare tactics by describing an imagined catastophe while asserting that the victims associates will only be safe after they have been victimized by your message.
There is no need for creativity: your victims are sufficiently gullible.
Interestingly enough: large graphics, garish colors, sound clips, animations (especially animations that flash large graphics, garish colors and sound) seem to increase the probability that your message will be forwarded while simultaneously making it more annoying to read.

[Tracking statement; Optional]
Again, craft this statement to play on your victim's sensibilities. You may ignore the reality that email tracking is impossible: your victims certainly will.

[Obligation to forward; Optional, but highly recommended]
The easiest way to do this is to simply say: Forward this email.
Imposing time limits sometimes helps, as many victims will obey and by the time they get a rational thought halfway inside their minds, the message is already on the way to all their friends. Example: "Forward this to 15 people in 10 minutes."
Use whatever method you can to incent your victims to forward your message.
Suggested methods: blatantly false promises, obviously empty threats, and perhaps the most successful of all: guilt.
Guilt is used by suggesting that the victim is not religious, patriotic, caring, or intelligent. (The beautiful irony with that last one is that if they were intelligent, they wouldn't have read this far!)