Wall Street Journal, Under the Radar
November 15, 2001
By William M. Bulkeley


Send an e-mail to your senator, and there is a growing likelihood that it will first be read by a computer system called EchoMail.


V.A. Shiva

The program, developed by EchoMail Inc., Cambridge, Mass., sorts, analyzes and even answers some of the e-mails sent to companies such as Kmart Corp., American Express Co. and Calvin Klein Inc. Now, after two years of pilot programs, more than 30 U.S. senators have installed it under a deal signed by the Senate sergeant-at-arms.

EchoMail (http://www.echomail.com/) was founded by V.A. Shiva, 37 years old, who sometimes calls himself "Dr. E-Mail." The company's program is designed to improve corporate responsiveness to e-mail by automating the processing. It recognizes preprogrammed key words and their synonyms and can even tell if the writer is angry, tipped off by exclamation points and such phrases as "I hated your product" or "please send me a replacement."

Some customers use it only to sort mail and route it to the right person, but many say it is smart enough to respond to most of the regular e-mail and to forward to humans the things it doesn't understand.

In the Senate, at least, most e-mails from constituents still get a glance from staffers. But "that's not going to last for long," says Sen. William Frist, a Tennessee Republican and technology enthusiast. He says EchoMail is good enough to categorize most e-mails and send appropriate responses.

Responding to constituents' calls, letters and e-mails occupies 30% to 60% of the staff time in many offices, says Richard Shapiro, executive director of the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit group that advises congressional staffers on running their offices. The group, which is urging congressmen to deploy EchoMail or other automated services to sort e-mail, says Congress last year got 80 million e-mails, five times as many as the paper letters.

Do constituents care that their e-mails weren't read by a congressman or aide? Mr. Shapiro says that in focus groups with constituents, "people understood their communications weren't from the member. They wanted responsiveness on a timely basis. They didn't care whether it was staff or whatever."

David Archambault, president of B3 Corp., Sherman Oaks, Calif., which runs Internet promotions for companies such as AOL Time Warner Inc., its majority owner, and Bank of America Corp., uses EchoMail to reduce customer-service costs. "I read about Shiva and tracked him down. I became enamored with the technology," Mr. Archambault says.