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[04/05/99]

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The federal government is learning something online businesses discovered long ago: E-mail is great until people start sending too much of it.

In the latest demonstration of computer technology surpassing Washington's ability to cope with it, the U.S. Forest Service scrambled to adopt new rules about how taxpayers can send electronic messages to all its employees.

The modern convenience of e-mail for citizens is proving inconvenient for the government as it struggles to balance its obligations to listen to the nation's populace against its desire to get work done.

The Forest Service changed its rules earlier this year after Andy Stahl, of the activist Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, discovered a way to send e-mail messages to 27,000 agency employees.

Then, about 40 groups and individuals sympathetic to forest industries caught wind of the stunt by Stahl, a former agency employee. They asked for e-mail addresses for all 34,000 employees so they, too, could send messages -- an estimated 1.3 million e-mails in total.

Fearing the agency's computers might crash under the strain, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck decided to become a human filter for all the digital discourse.

Under the agency's new policy, anyone who wants to get a message to all Forest Service employees will have to send it to Dombeck. If he decides the message is appropriate -- and he promises to be extremely lenient -- he will post it on the agency's internal Web site.

The Forest Service's dilemma isn't unique. Congress, too, is looking at ways to restrict the flow of constituent e-mail. The home page for the House of Representatives offers a "write your representative" tool, but citizens can write only to a single congressman, not all at once.

During the impeachment debate, e-mail flooded Capitol Hill and strained computer systems. And in 1996, the Federal Communications Commission received 200,000 messages in less than a week when consumers mistakenly believed the agency might propose an Internet tax. (The e-mail demanding that readers call their congressmen is still circulating on the Net.)

Some experts said the Forest Service handled its dilemma wisely.

"We're paying our taxes and funding these agencies to get work done," said Ray Everett-Church of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "If they're listening to these diatribes, they're not going to be doing the people's business."

McMasters said mass-mailing agency employees probably isn't worthwhile, anyway, because most key decisions are made by a few people at the top.

Stahl, the environmentalist, said he plans no more mass e-mails himself. But he supports anyone else who wants to send the "bulk" messages most Net users revile as spam. "It's called democracy," he said. "Communication should be free and open."

And if all that freedom and openness wears thin? "That's why you have a delete key."© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

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