Acknowledgment received
Received earlier today from whitehouse.gov:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for your message. On behalf of President Obama, we appreciate hearing from you. The President has promised the most transparent administration in history, and we are committed to listening to and responding to you.
In order to better handle the millions of electronic messages we are receiving and respond more quickly, we have implemented a new contact form on our website:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Please note that this web form has replaced comments@whitehouse.gov. That email address is no longer monitored, so we encourage you to resubmit your message
through the link above. Thank you for using the web form and helping us improve communications with you.Sincerely,
The Presidential Correspondence Team
Which seems reasonable enough, except that I’m pretty sure I didn’t submit a message to the White House in the first place. The email headers seem to check out, so I’m guessing that this is a legitimate response to someone’s form letter onto which my email address was slapped. This surprises me hardly at all — I seem to have been signed up for several dozen mailing lists, some on the political left, more on the right, without my knowledge — but it’s still somewhat startling to see correspondence of any sort from the White House sitting in my inbox.
Incidentally, in terms of Quality of Autoresponder Boilerplate, this one seems to rank pretty high compared to most of the ones I’ve seen lately, so my congratulations to the members of The Presidential Correspondence Team.
GraceKathryn »
1 November 2009 · 5:48 pm
Wow, that makes me want to email the White House just so I can get a fancy-pants email acknowledgment on behalf of the President!
It would definitely concern me a bit if someone were writing to the White House using my email address (or even worse, using my name), though. I guess there’s nothing much you can do about it, though.
CGHill »
1 November 2009 · 6:03 pm
After more than a decade of using this address, I am loath to throw it away, even though everyone and his Chinese drug-vending brother-in-law knows it by now.
RipVanTinkle »
1 November 2009 · 6:14 pm
Maybe they read your blog to try and
figure out why hardly anybody in Oklahoma voted for them.
CGHill »
1 November 2009 · 6:58 pm
They hardly need me for that.
McGehee »
1 November 2009 · 9:22 pm
Don’t be so sure, Charles. They’re not the sharpest bulbs in the Happy Meal.
fillyjonk »
2 November 2009 · 7:30 am
Another possibility: a few days back Lynn posted on the concept of sleep e-mailing. Apparently just like sleepwalking, some people e-mail in their sleep.
Which actually might explain some of the e-mails I’ve received at my campus address these days.