Hardly a day goes by without some startling revelation about a famous so-and-so being hooked on the designer substance of the hour. For the rest of us law abiding folk, there is always nicotine, caffeine, alcohol or sex. But a new addiction has recently come down the pike of the internet. No, it isn’t the much heralded pornography or shopping.com; it’s jokes.

If you have e-mail and a friend or two in your online "address book" then you probably know someone who is hooked on jokes. I have one friend who fits this bill.

I was an e-mail neophyte when I re-established my friendship with Frances, a girlfriend from high school. We reconnected via e-mail after a friend, who I actually talk to, gave her my e-mail address. Before you can say "your mail has been sent" I received a nice letter followed by a joke. Since the joke was actually funny I forwarded it to the other three people in my address book.

Before I go on, let me say that Frances lives in Israel. Whereas, a few years ago daily communication would have been prohibitively expensive, with unlimited internet access and a local server, you can receive hourly updates. Frances also keeps up with 75 of her closest friends.

The joke a day she sent me quickly grew geometrically. For a while I simply passed them on to the ever increasing list in my online address book.

Strange things happen when you start forwarding upwards of 25 jokes a day. I almost lost one friend because I sent so many jokes at one time the sheer volume caused her computer to crash; another friend became upset over the "obvious" right wing tone of the political jokes, while a third thought they were too far to the left. As I have painfully discovered in other areas of my life, humor is a very personal thing.

From these mishaps I have developed what may be the first e-mail etiquette rules for jokes. They are very simple and sticking to them may save a friendship.

Etiquette Rule #1: Ask before you send. While I have a friend who actually changed her online service so she could receive these jokes, there are people who do not want to receive gazillions of jokes every day. Perhaps they are humorless shut-ins who don’t care about the latest Bill Gates slam or political nursery rhyme. Maybe they are just too lazy to point and click that often. Or it could be because of. . .

Etiquette Rule #2: Beware of the cranky boss. This rule applies to friends who receive their e-mail at work. Today, goofing off on the job means computer games and surfing the internet instead of gossiping around the water cooler. I read that an eastern state government deleted the card game Solitaire, which came with the system software, and worker productivity increased by 25 percent.

The same may be true of jokes. One friend asked me if I could only send "the really funny ones." It seems her normally mild mannered boss logged onto the company internet site early one day and was none too happy to see a long list of particularly tasteless jokes from yours truly. (Of course, this was all Frances’ fault because most of them were from her.) Limiting the number of jokes sent per day brings us to. . .

Etiquette Rule #3: Honor all joke truces. As with international squabbles, honoring a joke truce is the hardest rule to keep. I almost feel it isn’t worth going on vacation, not because of the piles of bills, phone calls and yard work that await my return, but because of the 87 plus e-mail jokes in my inbox, mostly from Frances.

I have asked her to please take me off the list while I was gone but these words fell on deaf ears. After being gone 10 days last summer, I got up enough nerve to sign on and see what the damage was. There they were lined up like nuts on a Hershey bar, joke after joke. The real problem was that in the three days it took to read everything, I continuously had to break rules one and two, which made no one happy.

When I asked Frances why she did this to me, all she could muster for an excuse was a junkie’s, "I couldn’t help myself."

But as they say, paybacks are heck. Last November I received an interesting e-mail from my junkie friend. It seemed Frances was going to be gone for a month, so she sent all 75 of us a polite letter requesting that we not send her any jokes during that time with the possible exception of a really, truly funny one.

It is interesting what can be considered really, truly funny when revenge is on your mind. Judging from her near hysterical response when she returned, there were 74 other people who also severely lowered their humor standards.

On the positive side, after not hearing from one friend for a year, I inundated her with so many jokes that she finally e-mailed me with the subject heading of "I give up, I give in," and a nice, newsy letter.

As for Frances, I have one thing left to say: Did you hear the one about. . . .