I am guessing that somebody was offended by a joke that was forwarded, and "they" looked at the previous recipients of said joke. I normally remove things like this, but I guess some people are, as TCBF said, too lazy and/or stupid to do the same.
I'm not really sure how this effects anything, except that people can see who is on someone's joke email distribution lists. As a rule, I don't forward jokes (especially on DND assets), for this reason. I don't think anything can really be done to the people in the distribution list (i.e all the people who may have received the offending message) as I don't believe "they" can punish the recipients of unsolicited email. If that were the case, whomever keeps sending me offers on cheap Viagra and Cialis would be doing some hard time in Club Ed
By rights, though, anyone who receives offensive emails, distributed on DND IT assets, should be reporting said sender of message to their ISSO, and disciplinary action would be taken (first removing all the other recipients when they forward, but that doesn't really matter as the IT people would be able to see who else received the original email). Having said that, if most units are like mine, most of the biggest offenders of forwarding jokes, etc are people above myself in rank, so if all those that are guilty of this offense were to have their email PRIVILEGES revoked for violating the rules, there would be about a 95% reduction in the volume of emails across the CF. Now THAT would be a good thing.....
A while back, right after the SuperBowl, one of the the funnier commercials was making the rounds of the email system, and some people in the IS world in Ottawa (I believe) sent an email to our ISSO saying that they noticed that the amount of network traffic (within our unit) related to this video was taken notice of, and it had the potential to effect operational network traffic. In other words, Big Brother is watching, and that "harmless" video clip has the capability of disrupting the flow of LEGITIMATE network traffic to/from operations overseas.
Al