While electronic mail is still recognized by US nonprofits as a primary means of communicating with elected officials at the national level, e-mail campaigns and online petitions, however, are generally regarded with a high degree of suspicion, skepticism, or indifference by elected officials.

Assume, for a minute, that you were on the receiving end of a barrage of e-mail communications, especially junk mail or "spam." You have to go through each message and verify who generated it, whether there is any way to contact the sender, if it is a general or specific concern or set of issues the sender is trying to articulate, and what to do with it. Hill offices are not the only entities that must contend with such concerns. Chances are, you deal with this on a regular basis.

Think of those chain-mails some of you receive (and forward, come on admit it!), warning, for example, of "URGENT LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY" regarding the US Postal Service's attempt to levy a 5-cent surcharge on every email delivered within the United States, or the similarly suspicious "Alert to Save Funding for PBS, NPR, and NEA." These usually ask you to (1) forward a copy of the letter to other people who will then pass it along to others, and/or (2) sign your name to the attached e-mail "petition."

David Emery, the About.com guide for Urban Legends and Folklore, writes about the elements of faulty online petitions and campaigns, citing the PBS/NPR/NEA example as particularly instructive. In this case, two University of Northern Colorado students generated an e-mail petition to protect the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio from Republican threats to cut their funding. Everyone who receives the notice (which has been in circulation since 1995!) is asked to "sign" the document by adding their names to the bottom of the message, and then to forward it to others.

The initial intent may have been to alert and educate a broad (albeit unidentified) audience about the need to support a particular item. The notice has, however, outlived its usefulness. One of the reasons is that the petition was issued without any way to halt or recall it. There was no specific language regarding how long to circulate the message. Currently, people now add their own subject line to this (or a similar) message, so that it seems "fresh" and "new".

in general, one should be wary of the Internet tax e-mail and other "urban legends" or hoax messages, especially if they ask for personal information. Why? Among other reasons:

• If no one else has attached personal information, you will most likely be the only one who does so
• If you have no idea who the *original* sender is, you have no way to verify the legitimacy of the letter. Legitimate campaigns will at least point to an organization, phone number, mailing address, and website with information that is dated as current. If none of these components is in place, you should be hesitant to sign. If any of these components are present, you should follow up with any contact information available before signing.
• Some "chain mail" campaigns exist to clog the mail servers of their intended targets, for example, the mail server of a university, a nonprofit organization, the Hill, or the White House. Such efforts do grab media attention, and may show the target that there are a lot of people who received a particular message and felt encouraged to do something about it. "Clogging" efforts, however, may also backfire. Unless done with some planning, the ultimate effect could be to make the effort look malicious and focused on disrupting a mechanism, as opposed to presenting an actual concern.
• Other chain mail campaigns may cite organizations and people who do exist, yet may contain errors or false information that intentionally or unintentionally damage the reputation of groups cited.
• Online petitions, quite frankly, are not taken seriously. In the eyes of elected officials, names and e-mail addresses can be made up quite easily. As pointed out before, in the absence of concrete contact information, such as phone numbers and mailing addresses, the number of names adds up to nothing.

To get a sense of how many hoax messages are potentially floating around, it's worth noting how many messages are currently circulating.

In a July 1999 USA Today article, Karen Thomas cites the Electronic Messaging Association's figure of some 22.3 million home users who send an average of 64 messages a week, which translates into roughly 219 billion messages a year. AOL itself claims a figure of some 57 million e-mail messages that are processed to 136 million customers a day. By comparison, the United States Postal Service processes about 41 percent of the world's mail volume. That's about 630 million pieces of mail a day, or 3.4 billion pieces of mail delivered every week, to some 130 million delivery addresses, at an average of 24 pieces of mail per week.

None of the figures quoted counts the specific number of fraudulent or unsolicited mail, but if you want an idea of how many messages can be generated, consider another figure cited by Thomas. According to the Computer Incident Advisory Capability as saying that if each recipient of an e-mail forwards a message to 10 people, the ninth rending of the message itself can ultimately result in 1 billion messages.

Once an online petition is put out on the Internet, it is really difficult to terminate the message. A plea or urgent action notice can theoretically exist for all time as long as one person, receives, reads, and heeds the call to action. Chances are high that the more times a message gets passed along, the less likelihood there will be for future recipients to know the accuracy or timeliness of the petition.

Another note of caution: experts say that spammers use the long list of email addresses associated with petitions and other chain letters to build up their target list. Usually the first culprits are friends, family and co-workers. Invariably you will receive some hilarious joke or fascinating animated graphic that someone had to send to you... and a few hundred of their "closest" friends. Out of convenience, the sender will create a distribution list, making each recipient's e-mail address visible to anyone who receives the mail.

It is one thing when such a message reaches a well-defined list of people who elect to interact with one another via e-mail. But you can start to see some problems when messages are forwarded outside of that set group of recipients.

Again, out of convenience, people forward messages they receive to other lists. Most e-mail software lets you do this with one click of a mouse. Unfortunately, when a message is forwarded, it usually includes all of the e-mail addresses of previous recipients. So, potentially, e-mail addresses are vulnerable at least twice to all manner of eyeballs.

To make matters worse, spammers actively monitor e-mail lists, and use software tools that can automatically collect e-mail addresses from the "To," "From," and "Cc" fields in a message.

One of the things you can do to counter this is to encourage folks you receive messages from to include all of the recipients in the "Bcc" (blind carbon copy) field when sending messages. This will help shield all everyone's e-mail address from prying eyes. It won't help once your address has been circulated, but it might help stem future unwanted e-mails. You can also encourage people, when forwarding a message, to remove all unnecessary previous recipients that might show up. These folks will be grateful you did so.

Other things you can do to help protect the addresses and reputations of groups should a suspicious online petition or spam reach your mailbox:

• DO NOT HIT REPLY, even if you are given instructions to reply to an address to stop receiving unwanted messages. Many times, spammers use false addresses, or are waiting to see if the addresses they have collected are valid. Sending them a reply message only confirms that your inbox is open for all of their content.
• Send the full copy of any suspect message to your Internet Service Provider or system administrator
• Visit the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers, which coordinates a listing of the worst spam offenders, and links to other anti-spam resources.
• Send complete copies of spam, particularly online petitions from organizations that may ask for money as well as signatures, to the Internal Revenue Service's Internet abuse e-mail address.
• Use the built-in filter on your e-mail software (if you have that feature), or check out "anti-spam" shareware programs, including those available at the ZDNet Shareware Library and other sources. Check with your system administrators before downloading a program to ensure full compatibility with your existing software.

The best course currently for stemming the tide of the outdated petitions is simply to check around before sending a message to your mailing lists, and to simply hit delete when suspicious of the sender or the message.

Links Cited

Urban Legends and Folklore
David Emery, About.com guide

"E-Chain Letters Target Kids,"
USA Today, Karen Thomas's (7/7/99)

Electronic Messaging Association's

United States Postal Service statistic

Computer Incident Advisory Capability

Blacklist of Internet Advertisers
Alternate URL: http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL

Internal Revenue Service's Internet abuse e-mail address

ZDNet Shareware Library