I occasionally get what appear to be automated email requests to link to a site but they imply that a human has actually viewed my site and thought it was great. I typically just delete these.
The quality of incoming links is very important.
Simply having reciprocal links may not be a good idea. Search engines are always getting more sophisticated in detecting artificial linking patterns designed to boost or increase search engine rankings.
This is a good source of information:
http://www.searchenginenews.com/
I hope to have time to implement some of the suggestions there in the near future!