I emailed Senator Feinstein asking her to vote "Yes" in confirming Chuck Hagel as SOD and I get this
response:
Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to the President's nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. I appreciate hearing your views on this matter, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.
I strongly believe that a president is entitled to his cabinet selections unless there is something in an individual's record or background that is disqualifying, which I do not believe to be the case with Senator Hagel. I worked closely with Senator Hagel when he was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I believe that he is more than qualified to implement the Administration's policies in Afghanistan and around the world, as well as to manage the Department of Defense in an era of reduced spending.
Once again, thank you for writing. While we disagree on this issue, I hope that you will continue to keep me informed about issues of importance to you. Should you have any further comments or questions, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841, or visit my website at www.feinstein.senate.gov. Best regards.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the nation are available at my website, Feinstein.senate.gov. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list. Click here to sign up. And please visit my YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for more ways to communicate with me.
Now I really do believe they don't bother reading any emails they are sent. They really don't care do they? If they aren't going to read, can they at least get their responses right?
= new reply since forum marked as read
a fascinating study, especially in comparison to how they receive & process the various forms of 1% input.
I have always heard the email is the least respected mode of communication with congress-critters.
The highest is hand-written, not typed/word-processed, letters and 2nd would be other original (typed/word-processed) letters. Hard-copy letters are considered to have a ratio of 1:n in their weighting as to what they represent within a constituency. I can't remember what n is, but I think at one time I was told 1
-10; one hard-copy letter represents 7-10 other similar letters with the same or similar positions on whatever the issue is.
After hard-copy letters, phone calls are next most weighty. When I call a congress critter and get a staff person, which is the usual thing, I often wind up by asking them what they are going to tell my representative or senator about my position on the vote or the issue at hand. I think this whole question of how they receive and tally such phone calls bears much more light than it gets. I don't know how phone-calls received are weighted relative to the rest of a congress person's constituency, that is how many other people are assumed to have the same or similar view on the issue as that expressed by a phone caller?
I'm not sure where in the hierarchy of significance legally signed petitions place, but I do know that emails are last and I don't think that is necessarily the right weight to give to that form of communication. Are those emails stored digitally? What kind of database are they stored in? How searchable is that email database for content and how much focus can it achieve in its semantic resolutions?
But John Conyers is really one of the good ones. Don't know if you saw it, but he really did post here on DU! 
