For those of you who are worried about confidentiality in respect to the Mortgage Shortfall E-Petition, please read the following extract from the e-petition website ' www.petition-them.com '...... If you are a person signing a petition, we require that you supply your name and e-mail address (Not postal address). Your e-mail address is something unique to you, like a signature, that validates your agreement with the petition in question. However, we will only post your name on the site -so as to offer you a degree of confidentiality. We would not wish you to become the subject of 'spam mail' or other forms of unsolicited advertising. We will retain your e-mail address, privately for validation purposes and may contact you to check the address is authentic. In the near future it is likely that all e-mail addresses will be checked automatically to ensure authenticity. Even I can't access the info. Please keep the signatures rolling in, we are now over a 150, next stop 1,000. Many thanks, Mark.

-- M Amos (idgroms@hotmail.com), April 25, 2003

-- M Amos (idgroms@hotmail.com), May 17, 2003

Answers

Sorry, but eMail petitions are a waste of time - there is no way the authenticity of each "signature" can be verified so they are just ignored by people.

Checking that the eMail address is valid achieves nothing - what is to stop someone setting up dozens of seperate eMail addresses for themself ?

If you want to achieve something useful, you'd be far better advised to write to your MP; if you achieved 1000 signatures that is (approximately) 2 letters per MP.

-- Chris (chrsh@email.com), May 17, 2003.

In reply to the above. Obviously, you can never guarantee authenticity - even on a written petition. What the online petition does do is provide an indication of the strength of support. This is why the Consumer Association has also started their own e-petition in respect to the endowment problem. It also helps bring more publicity to the issue, in the case of the Mortgage Shortfall petition for example BBC news are interested in the outcome. In respect to contacting ones MP many people who have been following this site will know I, as indeed many others, have advocated doing this. You can also see the letters between myself and Ruth Kelly the Treasury Minister on repo problems. I am waiting for a further response from the Minister which I'll post up when I receive it.

Mark.

-- (idgroms@hotmail.com), May 19, 2003.