When does lobbying become denial of service?

I received 95 almost identical emails today from supporters of the Trade Justice Movement, each with the same 380Kilobyte attachment urging me to sign a pledge to support their agenda.

I agree with some but not all their aims, of which more anon.

I am quite sure that this was intended to show me how strongly they felt about the issue and not as a DOS attack.

However, lobby groups need to think about the possible consequence of this kind of campaigning. My present email account can handle that amount of traffic. Not all that long ago getting 35 megs of email in a day would have crashed the typical email account.

If the trend where lobby groups encourage their members and supporters to send hundreds of emails with big attachments to political candidates goes much further, it will start to have DOS effects even if that is not the intention. What will happen then is that instead of being able to publicise a personal email account, as we can do now, candidates will have to release contact details which use a high capacity commercial account, which almost certainly means one organised by the political party rather than the situation where people can contact the candidate directly.

The law of unintended consequences strikes again ...

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