On politically active procmail recipes Jul 13, 2005

As you're probably aware, I have recently graduated from college. My school's IT department lets graduating seniors keep their accounts for a period of around 6 months after they leave. I've decided to use mine to direct people to my new email address. If you send an email to my old Brandeis address, two things will happen: first, the email will be automatically forwarded to my new address. Second, you'll get an automated reply back from my procmail script politely informing you that I'm no longer using this address anymore, that your email has been automatically forwarded, and that you should use the new address in the future.

This sounded like a perfectly fine idea when I thought of it.

OK, so. I also subscribe to a political web site. The idea of it is pretty simple. Every so often, they send you an email about an issue they care about (and have taken a side on). If you agree with them, you just hit "Reply" and "Send," and they send a form letter from you to your representatives in Congress. Pretty cool, no?

Problem is, now that I'm automatically sending a reply to EVERYTHING. My procmail filter is at least 10 times more politically active than I ever was. So far, here are the issues it has supported:

Stopping the US from building new nukes Firing Karl Rove Ending world poverty Withdrawing our troops from Iraq Blocking Bush's judicial nominees

Not that I have that much of a problem with most of the stuff that TrueMajorityAction supports; I just typically want to have a say in the matter before having a letter sent in my name taking a side on something. For the moment, I've unsubscribed from their mailing list. I am, however, amused by the fact that anyone could theoretically have lots of automatically generated letters sent to Congress by these people just by using an inbox filter.