1. Email didn't destroy your friendship, previously unrecognized political differences did. There is a similar pattern that emerges often in interracial friendships, where folks start out laughing and loving, but when you peel back the veneer of compatibility, the unspoken political and social worldviews that are often tethered to ethnic (or gender, or sexual) identities cause a rupture in the once happy pairings. Usually it's not nearly so caustic as what you described, rather, people just stop communicating with one another and drift away. 2. Email didn't destroy your friendship, your poor use of it did. It was incredibly bad for you to forward emails to a group of people who don't know each other, without Blind Carbon Copying them. The only time emails of that nature should be sent is when people have opted-in to a mailing list of some sort, or when you know for sure that everyone on the list is familiar with each other in at least some rudimentary way. Bad netiquette, very bad. Art