I had a personal email when I was in the Senate, as the vast majority of senators do. It was very convenient. I did all of my business on personal emails.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've had more than 12,000 emails from the United States. It's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a British parliamentarian.
We get a ton of email; everybody does now. It gives us a kind of a pulse that you can feel. We hear people saying, thank you for being fair, for being balanced.
I have always used e-mail to the greatest extent possible.
There's a big gap between 'Click the link to send an e-mail to your congressman' and 'Chain yourself to the White House.'
After only two or three weeks in office, we discovered we had a backlog of 100,000 emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country - and all over the world, for that matter.
I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.
I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned. In particular, it's not strictly a work tool or strictly a personal thing. Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them.
I used to say that I didn't want anything to do with e-mail. It seemed really impersonal, complicated and weird. I had no idea what an amazing way it is to reach people.
Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform.
I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.