Well, Sajeev, it looks like the White House doesn't want to receive e-
mail from the outside. But this really isn't the case. What has
happened is that the computer transition from the old president to
the new one has been, to put it mildly, rocky.
Some of Clinton's staffers deleted files from White House computers,
even though they're forbidden from doing that by law. They may have
deleted files necessary to run the mail processing system. And there
have been stories about various types of computer damage that
occurred during the "exit parties."
On Bush's side, the new team put up presidential web sites that were
not ready for prime time. There's some chance that the e-mail
handler got munged by one of the new people, since they don't appear
to be real tech-savvy about the whitehouse systems yet (such as they
are--any system that can't manage backup of over a year of the vice
president's correspondence is being run badly). Or they could be
trying to fix problems that they inherited. Since the White House
gets hundreds of thousands of e-mails per day, it wouldn't take much
to bring the system to its knees.
I'm willing to bet that the Bush system administrators have
temporarily disabled the normal e-mail system, regardless of who
might have done what to it. It will probably be back up eventually.
The fixes are not likely to be trivial.
Frankly, I have no idea why you are sending e-mail to the president,
but with the volume that's sent to that e-mail address, I doubt if he
sees any of it. Whoever is processing all it goes through it very
quickly--the process is somewhat automated--and isn't likely to pay a
lot of attention to any one piece. (Except of course to threats,
which are sent to the Secret Service, who *does* take them
seriously.) It's summarized: for example, "8,230 people are in
favor of colonizing Atlantis, 3,671 opposed." The president isn't
even likely to hear about most of the summaries, since all this stuff
goes to an aide who decides what's relevant.
It's probably not the best route to accomplish what you'd like to,
since it's very, very difficult to rise above the crowd in this case.
Most activists in the US will tell you that sending e-mail is much
less effective than a telephone call, which is less effective than a
fax, which is less effective than a typed letter, which is less
effective than a hand-written letter. Interesting that the more
primitive form of communication, the more respected the contents, but
it has to do with the perceived amount of expended effort and cost.
E-mail obviously takes much less effort and is almost free, so its
value is discounted. The increase in the number of internet sites
that allow a cause supporter to send "canned" e-mail letters even
more quickly hasn't helped that valuation.
[Around 1990, my employer at the time bid on a project to put in e-
mail for the House of Representatives, so I got a bit of an inside
look at how such systems work. The data on how much e-mail is coming
in to the various officials' offices is pretty much public data,
although it's still disorganized and scattered, so the volume is
probably higher than stated. And, believe it or not, there are still
some members of Congress whose offices don't handle e-mail.
Something about leading a horse to water comes in here. Technical
literacy is obviously not a requirement to be a politician.]
> Sir/M'm,
> Why am I getting the following error while sending a mail to
> the President of USA through my ISP provided email?
> I quote :
>
> Your message was not delivered because the destination computer does
> not support electronic mail (SMTP). Correct any mistakes in the
> address and try sending the message again.
>
> whitehouse.gov doesn't support SMTP mail delivery
> The following recipients did not receive this message:
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>>
>
>
> Regards,
> Sajeev.
