Scottish Parliament Email

[Richard Clayton]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

[[ This is obliquely relevant to UKcrypto@ in its wider ambit of
"worrying about E-Government and Government use of E-" ]]

One of the many things that I look after is quite a large mailing list
which carries occasional items of interest to ukcrypto@ readers and
like-minded folk. [in fact many ukcrypto@ readers are on the list]

Some of the people on the list are MSPs and their assistants.

However, the Scottish Parliament was recently dissolved, and the
officials there seem to have decided that this means that no-one should
have any scottish parliament email addresses until after the upcoming
election on 1st May.

They helpfully send a "bounce" when email is undeliverable and provide a
(mainly complete) list of forwarding addresses for MSPs

        http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/msps/msp-email.htm

though _not_ for their assistants!

Since we all know (from history) that the overwhelming majority of
members will keep their seats (and their assistants) and therefore will
continue to have the same email addresses after May, it does seem
somewhat short-sighted of someone to deprive them of mailing list email
in the meantime (or force them to use personal email addresses rather
than Official ones for this sort of purpose).

I don't think Westminster does the same thing (? listmasters may
comment) but of course they also have a lot of permanent House of Lords
entries in their directory, so mass deletion may be somewhat harder.

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

Are you a Friend of FIPR yet?       http://www.fipr.org/friends.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1

iQA/AwUBPpLH9hfnRQV/feRLEQKp1QCffTIMJQo8crx+xGb2EXILoOH3jiUAoN8m
jAlDI2XGW4i1tGvXWHmdZpSD
=0mos
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----