Thoughts on email service for legislators (and other elected officials)

Putnam Barber / March 20, 1994

Email is like any other form of communication. It can be useful. It can be foolish. It can be abused.

Email has some distinctive characteristics which suggest that it needs to be handled differently from other forms of communication if the public and elected officials are to get maximum benefit from its strengths and avoid the worst of its pitfalls.

Email will also change as the technology and its uses evolve. Care needs to be given in developing procedures so as to anticipate (as far as possible) the ways these facilities will be used in the future and to minimize the costs of adapting to new facilities and uses as they are discovered and widely adopted.

Senders

There is no practical way of identifying with certainty the sender of an email message at the present time. Therefore no official should rely upon email messages for critical communications that are not in some sense confirmed through other channels. (These same difficulties apply, of course, to other forms of communication as well -- all sorts of fraud have and will be attempted in the effort to influence the performance of public officials. The relative ease and low cost of email forgery and impersonation make the problem more worrisome, not different in kind.)

(There are practical ways to make it extremely difficult to identify the sender of an email message; my advice is that officials should treat anonymous email in the same way that anonymous phone calls and letters are currently handled. I hope they are ignored unless threatening and turned over to law enforcement when they are.)

First Response

Officials should install automated response machinery that acknowledges all incoming email to the "From:" address given. This automated acknowledgment should make no attempt to respond to the substance of the incoming message. Rather, it should contain the following four elements:

  1. "Thank you for sending mail to my office about < subject -- taken from the "Subject:" line of the incoming message> . It will be reviewed by staff and, if possible, by me. You will receive a specific response by email, or in some cases, by US Mail, once that review is completed."

  2. "There are some simple things you can do to help me and my staff respond to your mail quickly and intelligently. If you would like to receive a copy of the guidelines for preparing mail in ways that will help us, please send a message to < ADDRESS@ETC> with a single line subject saying 'INFO CORRESPONDENCE'."

  3. "In my office we do not respond to anonymous letters or phone calls. I have directed my staff to focus attention on issues that are related to the interests of my district, matters before the committees on which I serve, and those issues which are likely to be decided by the House (or the Senate) in the near future. If your letter does not fit into those categories, it may receive a standard reply, prepared by the Library of Congress (or whoever), which outlines in general terms any current Congressional attention to the issues you have raised. I hope you find such materials useful. Please feel free to write to me again if you feel we have missed the point of your initial correspondence."

  4. "Please remember that it is not possible to guarantee the privacy of email communications. Correspondence addressed to me will of necessity be reviewed by staff in my office and, perhaps, by others. It may also be intercepted and read by individuals not connected with my office and unknown to you. Please do not use email for sensitive, personal or confidential communications, which should be handled in other ways."
Among other benefits of sending automated responses along these lines is the fact that doing so delivers a notice to the person named in the "From:" line of incoming correspondence that mail is being sent from that address. If that comes as a surprise, such notice offers the possibility of corrective action.

Guidelines For Correspondence

[This section is written as if it were the response to the "INFO" request mentioned in paragraph 2 above.]

Information on Preparing Email to be Handled Most Efficiently in the Offices of < name>

This office receives approximately 00000 pieces of mail and 00000 telephone calls about legislative and other business each week. One great advantage of using email for both sender and receiver is that a certain amount of screening and preliminary handling can be done by automated machinery. Your willingness to prepare email to us in a format adapted to automated processing will make it more likely that we can attend to your interests, and to those of other people who contact us, in a responsive and timely fashion. Thank you for requesting this set of guidelines that can help you help us in these ways.

  1. Keep It Simple! Use a separate email communication for each issue or topic you would like to raise with us. Identify the topic succinctly in the subject line of the message. Don't worry about sending multiple messages. Each message will be carefully handled as quickly as possible.
  2. Identify yourself fully. Spell out your name (in addition to your email return address), give a street address including ZIP-code, daytime and evening telephone numbers, and any affiliations or other identification which you think will help us in understanding the issues that you want to raise with us. (Please note that we do not respond to anonymous mail or telephone calls unless they are of a threatening nature, in which case they are turned over to law enforcement agencies for their review and action if warranted.)
  3. If you want to correspond with < name> about a matter which is currently the subject of a specific proposal in Congress, choose one of the following formats for the "Subject:" line of your message. As explained below, some of these formats are used simply to tally reactions from constituents and others. If you use one of these, you should limit the body of the message to identifying yourself as requested. These messages are automatically tallied, but they are not read for content.

  4. If you want to correspond with < name> about a general matter of public policy, you can do so by sending mail with a subject line that reads GENERAL COMMENTS on < subject> . These messages will be reviewed by staff and used in forming positions and developing proposals whenever possible. Depending on the nature of your comments and ideas, you may receive an acknowledgment of your correspondence, further information on related topics, or some other reply that reflects action we can take. You name may also be put on a list or lists to receive email updates about related subjects in the future. If you find that you are receiving unnecessary email as a result, please let us know (by forwarding back to us copies of the mail you don't want to receive along with your instructions).
  5. If you want to correspond with < name> about a request for some specific action by a federal department or any other organization you feel we can help you with, please send mail with a subject line that reads HELP with < name of department or organization>
    Individuals on the staff specialize in dealing with particular departments, so it will help us to deal with your request quickly if you identify it in this way. When writing for the first time, please give us only a simple outline of the problem and the action you would like to see taken; let us know if you have documents and other background materials which might be helpful. The assigned staff will be in touch to let you know what further information is needed as soon as possible.
  6. And lastly, if you would like to schedule an appointment with < name> , invite < him/her> to a meeting or other event, or learn of plans for public events where < he/she> will be present, please use one of these formats for the subject line of your message. Please remember that there are a great many demands on the time of a member of Congress. Every effort will be made to honor your request, but it may not be possible to do so. We will be in touch with you as soon as possible after hearing from you.

Official Addresses

There should be standardized modes of address for each member of Congress that frees the public from the need to find addresses, spell names correctly, etc.

The simplest would be a combination of the District and the State with the name of the body: To: REP-WA-7@US.HOUSE.GOV < = would get me Jim McDermott

or To: SEN-SR-WA@US.SENATE.GOV < = would get me Slade Gorton

But defective addresses should be permitted as well:

Replacing the district number with a ZIP-code should be encouraged (when people are unsure of the right number), and Post Office staff at the Capitol trained to route the mail appropriately (with the few overlapping cases sent routinely to both Reps. And it should be legal to spell out the words fully without penalty ("REPRESENTATIVE" for "REP", "7TH" for "7", etc, etc)

Hard as it is to contemplate, both Senators should be sent mail that is addresses to SEN-WA@US.SENATE.GOV and some compact between them be worked out to avoid duplications of effort.

The system should be based on the PO two-letter codes, but the mail-handling software should be robust enough to deal with common variations (many people still say WN for WA, even years after the PO changed its mind). This software could even be made mildly intelligent, in the sense that it is programmed to "learn" from the humans who read undeliverable addresses and follow their lead if the same defective address appears on further mail.

There should also be a general purpose "How to write to Congress" message that can be sent back by the Capitol PO when mail is simply uninterpretable. It should never happen that a citizen thinks they have communicated with Congress and the message has been discarded without attention!

Committees should also have official addresses, "How To" files that are sent back automatically explaining how mail is handled, and a system for informing members and staff what mail has been received. Copies of incoming mail addressed to the committee should not simply be routed to every office; often that would result in duplicate copies of already redundant mail clogging up the system.

Personal Addresses

Members should have mail-boxes for mail from people they wish to be in personal contact with. There should be automatic software that allows for the occasional alteration of these addresses with automatic notification to all confidants (or :-) nearly all), so that if the address is being used for other sorts of correspondence it can simply be abandoned without loss.

Members should also have cards printed that carry an email address to be used by people they meet on the road who have problems or ideas the member wants to give special attention to. If it were me, I would have the card printed with an email address for a non-existent special assistant ("Betty Crocker") so when mail arrived addressed to that person, the reception staff would know that it deserved (at least initially) special attention and a non-routine reply.

Bulk Mailings

The most insidious feature of the use of email to correspond with elected officials will be the collection of "From:" addresses by interest groups who will secure permission to send mail in their supporters' names. Software to create such mail will be easy to write, and the resulting communications hard to distinguish (on both personal and political grounds) from "real" mail.

To some extent, the automated responses described above will bring a breeze of candor into this process. That's why it's so important that they be instituted early and completely.

But I urge that some smart programmers be brought on to start designing systems so the mail-handling computers can identify these sorts of mailings and give members automatic "deflation factors" that render them ineffective early on. If the computer said something like "Sir, we think we received 12,353 letters last week from the Elastic Stopnut Association's computer; they were all opposed to stiffening the standards", the member would be able to weigh those letters against the 7 received from fastening engineers, writing on their own time, who said the standards were way too lax. If it mattered, a bulk-mail response could be sent out that disparaged bulk mail attempts to influence such decisions and, one hopes, made the managers of the Assoc think twice before letting themselves be mocked in that way again.

I urge that this be done early because I think Congress can always win such contests, but it will be greatly cheaper to signal the intention to win them early and not wait around until bulk email has become such a nuisance that something has to be done but many associations have big investments in the machinery to do it and have to be dissuaded by tougher measures than these.

Spoofing

As I said, there's nothing that can be done now to prevent someone from appropriating another's identity for the purpose of communicating with an elected official. Letting the victim know that the mail has been received is something. It should make it a great deal less fun for the spoofer when they discover that their fake messages are being disowned by those who have been impersonated. I don't think this problem should be used to delay the widespread use of email for routine correspondence between citizens and elected officials. The savings and improvements are too valuable. I suspect that secure "signature" systems will be available at low cost, soon. Until then, we should just grit our teeth and hope to be too earnest, too busy, and too businesslike to let a few trouble makers cut us off from use of a valuable tool.
Putnam Barber / Seattle, WA / pbarber@eskimo.com