Legislators: You've Got Mail.

• Author: Greenberg, Pam

It's getting more like mind-reading all the time. Now there are software programs that can compose automatic intelligible answers to e-mails. But legislators have to decide how, when and where to use this and other new technology.

Until now, only a human being could read and understand an e-mail message. Until now, only a person could sense the attitude of the sender, or recognize whether he was making a comment, asking just one question or making two separate requests. Until now, it took a person to compose a reasoned, personalized response to a constituent's e-mail.

But now there is EchoMail. The U.S. Senate, according to the Boston Globe, will be able to use EchoMail software to manage constituent e-mail. EchoMail will "sort through the senator's position papers on those issues, string together prefabricated paragraphs from its data bank, and then fuse them into a coherent, seemingly personalized whole that would be sent as a response.

"In most cases, a human aide in the Senate office would never read the constituent's e-mail; EchoMail would simply extract all useful information from the message and log the constituent's concerns and e-mail address into the senator's data bank.

"Instead of having to sift through thousands of messages, a Senate aide could simply be presented with EchoMail's overview of what's on the minds of voters," the Globe reports.

UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS

A survey last fall by the polling firm Hart-Teeter found that most people--72 percent--predict that the Internet and e-government will change things for the better by improving people's ability to communicate with their elected representatives. Is this what they had in mind?

But it's not just legislators who are taking this approach to communication. citizens have similar opportunities to make "meaningful" contact with elected officials. Web sites provide boilerplate language on an issue, offer lists of legislator e-mail addresses ready to cut and paste, and encourage visitors to "send a message" to lawmakers without regard to district representation or appropriate level of government. "Grass roots" efforts can push out thousands of e-mails that require no real effort or original thought on the part of the sender. Highly publicized hot button issues--as varying and unpredictable as the protection of gray wolves or building sports stadiums--can bring in thousands of e-mails.

Only computers, perhaps, can deal with that kind of volume. And perhaps it's only fair or appropriate that a computer-generated message receive a computer-generated response.

PEOPLE WANT INSTANT RESPONSES

Senator Debra Bowen of California regularly receives some 400 messages a day. "Even if I knew I had an e-mail from someone who was a constituent, it's not possible for me to personally respond to every e-mail or letter I get," she says. "The most important thing to do is to manage people's expectations properly--one of the difficulties with e-mail and the whole e-mail culture is that people expect instant responses. They think that if they e-mail you the night before a vote is to be held, they can expect you to e-mail them back and tell them how you will vote before you do so.

With the help of her computer, Bowen does, however, respond to all her messages. She uses an e-mail...