Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

By default, my office will respond to e-mail messages from New Mexico constituents with return e-mail. Because of the unique nature of e-mail correspondence, I believe it is important to be honest about what is and is not feasible.  That is the purpose of this message.

Who can receive an e-mail response from your office?

I will respond via e-mail to any correspondence that comes to me from New Mexico residents, or from people with ties to the state. Unfortunately, due to staff and resource limitations, I cannot return an electronic response to people who do not meet these criteria.

Are my e-mail messages to you, and any you send back to me, private?

The Internet is a public network. A message can be read and even modified at any juncture between sender and receiver. Many people use the analogy of Internet messages being similar to postcards, rather than letters, which can be read by anyone who turns the postcard over.

Because of the inherent lack of privacy on the Internet, my office will not respond electronically to any message requesting help with casework, projects, grants, or other personal or privileged information.  That is why we ask you to include your phone number in case we need to reach you on personal matters.

If you receive a message which you feel may have been sent under a fraudulent "Bingaman Office" or "United States Senate" ID, or that you feel may have been modified between my office and you, please report this immediately to my Systems Administrator at (202) 224-5521.

How quickly will I receive an e-mail response back from you?

Although e-mail certainly increases the speed of correspondence, the "behind-the-scenes" efforts of my staff in responding to mail, and our ongoing commitment to quality, will not always facilitate the kind of speedy response users of Internet e-mail may anticipate.

My office receives between 500 and 2000 letters, phone calls, faxes and e-mails a week. Although we have a very small staff, I have made mail a priority for my office. We make every effort to ensure that every constituent who contacts me receives a timely, accurate and thorough response. To aid in this process, every contact my office receives from a constituent is logged into a mail tracking system. My staff then researches the issues presented in the correspondence and prepares a response. The response is proofread twice, signed by me, and sent out. This process is an integral part of our mail system.

Regardless of how a letter is received in my office, or how we ultimately return our response, that letter must still be routed through this mail tracking process. It may take from two days to two months for a letter to complete the process, depending on the amount of research required to respond, the total volume of mail I am receiving at that time, and other factors.

Simply stated, this internal review process precludes me from being able to respond to your message immediately. Although responding electronically will increase the speed by which you receive our response once it is sent from my office, each letter still needs to be routed through our internal mail process so that we can ensure it is responded to properly. I hope you will understand that accuracy and completeness of response are more important to me than speed of response, and that sometimes the two are mutually exclusive.

What is a reasonable time to expect to hear back from you?

You should receive a response from my office within two weeks, and often much sooner. If you have not heard from us within three weeks, or you have reason to believe your message to us did not go through, please contact us by phone to check whether or not your message was received. Please be prepared to submit another copy of your message if it was not received intact in our office.

Will you always respond electronically to my messages?

We will certainly try to respond to your messages in the manner you prefer. But as all of us living in the electronic age know, information systems are prone to outages. If you find a response from us in your postal mailbox rather than your e-mail inbox, you'll know that something was out of order in my office when we prepared your response.

One exception to these scenarios is if our response to you includes an enclosure that cannot be sent in e-mail. In this case, we will send the entire letter - with the enclosure - through postal mail.

Should I still include my postal mailing address in my e-mails to you?

Yes, please include your postal mailing address in any messages you send to my office. We track mail by postal mailing address, even though we respond electronically.

What should I do if my e-mail address changes?

In this case, please contact my Washington office to request that we update our records you’re your new e-mail address.