Again, e-mail...

To continue my earlier rant on the impediment that a web-form represents in communicating with your elected representatives, consider my last post, on my communication with Senator Boxer. I sent an e-mail, via her web-form, and received a reply. The reply clearly stipulated, in a postscript:

Please do not reply to this e-mail. This is not an active e-mail address.

If you wish to comment further on this issue or an any other issue and want to ensure an answer--please complete the form at http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm

So, even after the office staff has deemed an e-mail worthy of a categorical reply, no possibility of dialogue will be tolerated. Instead, it's back to the web-form, if I wish to continue. Now, here are some of the objections I would raise to that process:

1. If I wish to record my communications to Senator Boxer (or anyone else using that fouled up approach to "communication", I will have to edit them in some text editor, save a copy, and then paste to the web-form. Standard e-mail would alleviate the need for those extra steps.
2. If I wish to communicate again, on the same issue, and make them understand that it's not a new letter, but a continued communication, I will need to cut and paste from the record I had to save separately, as the web-form clearly doesn't support quoting from an earlier message; in the web-form world, there is no earlier message. No context. No history. Scale the mountain again; from the base.
3. Now, supposing that I did save a record, and further, that I quoted from that record, I will before long run afoul of their fairly standard 10,000 character limit. And for anyone not conversant with computerese, characters means not only letters, but spaces and punctuation, as well. And line breaks.

Do you really suppose that any one of our elected representatives that so carefully avoides giving out an e-mail address has any slightest interest in what we may wish to communicate? Really? Then no doubt you also believe in the Easter bunny!