I have a few pet peeves in life, things like warm beer, tight underwear and anything with Ryan Seacrest. But few things drive me up a wall as much as email "forwards."

For those of you who might not be familiar with email "forwards," let me give you a little sample.

You open your inbox to a message with a subject line that reads, "Fwd: fwd: Fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: You Gotta Read This." What follows is usually a list of 9,389 email addresses of people who have already received this email over the past 400 years along with a 9,000-word treatise about a man and a dog looking for heaven and a bowl of water or something.

The fact is, forwarded emails have been around for hundreds of years.

I know what some of you are thinking: The Internet -- The Source Of All Truth -- has only been around since 1901, when it was invented by Al Gore.

That's a joke, of course. Al Gore didn't invent the Internet - The Source Of All Truth -- until the 1920s.

Again, that's not exactly true, but it's close. Seriously, the first forwarded email was actually a chain letter that began circulating in 1105. It was started when a religious fanatic named Herman Wozniak wrote a letter, made copies at his local Kinko's and began passing the copies around claiming they originated from Al Gore.

Ha. Another joke. Herman actually claimed the letter was penned by none other than the Pope himself.

The letter instructed the receiver to make 100 copies (also at a local Kinko's) and pass the copies out within five days to friends, family and others in the receiver's address book. There were stories about the faithful few who passed out the copies and received rewards like money, girls and Ryan Seacrest marathons. For those who didn't heed the call to pass out the copies ... it was death -- death by Ryan Seacrest marathons. It was horrible.

There have been variations of the chain letters through the years.

Remember the one back in the 1970s that told people they needed to return the letter to the sender along with $1? In return, the receiver could then send the letter out to all his friends asking for $1 in return. If everything worked according to plan, the receiver could earn up to $3 -- minus stationery, stamps and a humongous Kinko's bill.

Today, the chain letter or forwarded email is way too easy. You can now send an email to hundreds and hundreds of people with a couple of keystrokes -- no visit to Kinko's needed.

Forwarded emails today consist of messages about free food coupons from Cracker Barrel, millions of dollars being handed out by Bill Gates and plans of Disneyland building new theme parks near Boley, Okla., and Celina, Texas. While all of these emails seem like they could be true, they are, in fact, all false. But they continue to traverse the globe via the World Wide Web.

I actually don't receive that many email forwards any more. People pretty much know that I won't open them, so don't send them my way. But I have a new perpetrator, who I will call Steve (because that's his name), who just won't quit.

Steve got my name innocently enough. Sometimes groups of people need to share their email addresses in order to conduct business. Instead of sending hundreds of individual emails to communicate something, you can click on a group and send one email to everyone on the list. My email address was on one of those lists. Steve received an email with my email address along with several other people's email addresses. The first email I got from Steve was all business.

Plenty of good information.

But then it started.

I started getting two and three and four forwarded emails a day. At first I would open them and scroll down about 2 inches before I hit the "Delete" button. Then I started just deleting them without even opening them. Then it got so bad I created a "rule." If an email came from Steve's email address, my software will do the following: Delete the message and put the message in a giant bonfire and send an automatic reply to Steve threatening to send Ryan Seacrest to his house to perform show tunes from "Cats".

You don't want that, Steve. Trust me.

So, I guess the message is this: If you have something to say to somebody, just say it. Don't send them what somebody else said to somebody else who said it to somebody else.

But seriously, if you get those Cracker Barrel coupons, please give me a call.

To read more of Rodney Hays' humor, check out his blog at www.rodneyhays.com. Follow him on Twitter and become a friend on Facebook.