NYT: White House E-Mail System Becomes Less User-Friendly. Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.
The obvious purpose of this is to deter letter-writers. That’s understandable, given the volume the White House receives. But the bureaucratic defense, calling the move an “effort to be more responsive,” as someone told the Times’ John Markoff, doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Another, smaller motive for the redesign may be found in the character of this particular administration. Bush and his people are especially uninterested in hearing from anyone who disagrees with what they’ve already decided.
I doubt the Clinton people paid any serious attention the e-mail, either. But at least they didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who bothered to express their views.
Advice: Don’t bother complaining to the White House about this. No one is listening.
Posted by: Matthew on July 18, 2003 03:50 PM
One can easily infer from this that there is a script that deletes any message where the writer clicks the disagree button.
Posted by: Jim on July 18, 2003 05:57 PM
If it were simply a way to sort the mail, it wouldn’t ask whether or not you support the policy.
Posted by: Floyd McWilliams on July 18, 2003 06:34 PM
>If it were simply a way to sort the mail, it wouldn’t ask whether or not you support the policy.
Do you think politicians avidly scan their mail for policy ideas? The only thing Bush or any other politician cares about is whether or not voters approve of his policies.
If the gauntlet of web pages reduces the number of emails the White House gets, that is a good thing. Why should my tax money pay for several dozen drones to filter out spam, drunken ramblings, and messages typed in all caps?
It’s been a long time since anyone insulted my intelligence as badly as the third sentence of the quoted article:
“In the past, to tell President Bush
Posted by: Michael Schuermann on July 18, 2003 07:59 AM
Please. It’s just challenge/response technology, combined with extra data appended to the email so that the White House can more easily sort the email automatically. That’s all they’re doing. Please don’t read conspiracy into everything. Regardless of political beliefs, keep in mind that it’s good to be more efficient sometimes, and that’s obviously what’s happening here. Along with the need to probably reduce spam…