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Whitehouse.gov was established to allow you to send
electronic correspondence to the President and Vice President.
The only valid addresses at whitehouse.gov are the following:
President@whitehouse.gov
and Vice.President@whitehouse.gov
You may be interested in obtaining White House
documents and publications, such as the President's Weekly Radio
Address to the Nation. We have an address for requesting and
receiving these publications by email. The address is:
publications@whitehouse.gov
To receive instructions, please send a message to the address
above (**do not "reply" to the memo you are now reading**). In
the body of your message, type "Send Info" (without quotes); no
other text should be included (i.e., message headers or signature
lines (.sig files)). The instructions will be sent to you
automatically.
Also, we now have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document
available at the following address. The FAQ, among other things,
lists other sources of government information, i.e., the
Congressional email projects. You may not make comment to this
FAQ address. It is an autoresponder only. Send an email message
(no text necessary) to:
faq@whitehouse.gov
All of us at the White House are excited about the progress
that has been made with this historic project, and we look
forward to future developments. Your continued interest and
participation is very important to us.
Sincerely,
Stephen K. Horn
Director
Presidential E-Mail
faq@whitehouse.gov:
WHITE HOUSE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS AND PUBLIC ACCESS EMAIL
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Updated May 27, 1994
Version 1.9
What's New:
Section III and IV are now Sections I and II, respectively, and vice versa.
Section II - Addition of additional government ftp and gopher sites.
Table Of Contents
I. Sending Email to the White House.
- Internet Direct
II. Sending Email to Congress; ftp and gopher
- Internet Direct
- Other Government Sources
III. Searching and Retrieving White House documents.
- Publications@WhiteHouse.GOV
- WAIS
- GOPHER
- FedWorld BBS
IV. Signing up for Daily Electronic Publications.
A. Widely Available Sources.
B. Notes on Widely Available Sources.
C. Direct Email Distribution.
D. Email Summary Service.
V. President's Saturday Morning Radio Address
- Local Broadcast
- FTP retrieval of audio files
VI. Submitting Updates to the FAQ
******************************************************
I. HOW DO I SEND EMAIL TO THE WHITE HOUSE?
We are pleased to introduce this new form of communication with the
White House for the first time in history. As we work to reinvent
government and streamline our processes, this electronic mail project
will help put us on the leading edge of progress. Please remember,
though, this project is still very much under construction. The Office
of Correspondence is currently working on defining what this system
will do, as well as addressing equipment and staffing needs.
When you send a message to the White House you will receive an immediate
acknowledgment that your message has been received. THIS IS THE ONLY
ELECTRONIC RESPONSE YOU WILL RECEIVE FROM WHITEHOUSE.GOV. If
you include your street address in your message, you may receive a
response by U.S. Mail. Please be assured that every electronic mail
message received is read and analyzed by staff. Your concerns and your ideas
are carefully recorded and reported to the President and Vice President
weekly.
You can send email to the following addresses:
Internet Direct: President@WhiteHouse.GOV
Vice.President@WhiteHouse.GOV or
Vice-President@WhiteHouse.GOV
There are no other valid addresses at whitehouse.gov. You may send
correspondence to the First Lady at the following mail address:
Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
II. HOW DO I SEND EMAIL TO CONGRESS?
The House and the Senate are establishing electronic public access links.
You can access Congressional information via the protocols listed below. For
additional information, please contact the offices of your Representative or
Senators.
Site Protocol Host/connection
House Email Congress@hr.House.GOV
Gopher Gopher.House.GOV
[URL: "Gopher://Gopher.House.GOV/11"]
Senate Gopher Gopher.Senate.GOV
[URL: "Gopher://Gopher.Senate.GOV/11"]
FTP FTP.Senate.GOV
Library of Congress Gopher Marvel.LOC.GOV
[URL: "Gopher://Marvel.LOC.GOV/11"]
FTP seq1.LOC.GOV
Telnet LOCIS.LOC.GOV
OTHER GOVERNMENT SOURCES
Government documents: gopher esusda.gov
Government documents: gopher sunsite.unc.edu
Americans Communicating
Electronically (ACE): gopher ace.esusda.gov
Federal Publications BBS: (202) 512-1387
National Institutes
of Health (NIH) BBS: (301) 480-5144
National Institutes of
Health (NIH) : gopher gopher.nih.gov
National Institute for
Science and Technology : gopher gopher.nist.gov (login: gopher)
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Adm. (NOAA): gopher gopher.noaa.gov
National Science
Foundation (NSF) : gopher gopher.nsf.gov
U.S. Geological Survey : gopher gopher.usgs.gov
Department of Education : gopher gopher.inet.ed.gov
Federal Information
Exchange (FEDIX) : gopher fedix.fie.com
FEDIX Dial-in (modem) : 1-800-783-3349
Smithsonian Institution
Natural History : gopher gopher.smithson.si.edu
Brookhaven National
Laboratory -- Protein
Data Bank (PDB) : gopher gopher.bnl.gov
Bureau of the Census: gopher gopher.census.gov
" " " " : ftp ftp.census.gov/pub
Please note that these are not connected in any way to any White House online
projects, so if you have any problems with Congressional or other systems,
you will need to contact their system administrators for assistance.
III. HOW DO I SEARCH AND RETRIEVE WHITE HOUSE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS?
The White House is pleased to announce the establishment of an Internet
address for retrieving White House publications. We have set up an
Almanac server to process requests by email. To receive instructions on
using this server, send a message to:
Publications@WhiteHouse.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
send info
All of the White House documents available through email retrieval are
also available by anonymous ftp at ftp.whitehouse.gov.
Various additional sites are archiving the press releases as distributed.
What follows is an incomplete list of some of the sites containing the
documents that have been released to date. This FAQ will be updated to
reflect new sites as they become known.
SITE DIRECTORY
1. SUNSITE.UNC.EDU pub/academic/political-science/whitehouse-papers
2. FTP.CCO.CALTECH.EDU /PUB/BJMCCALL
3. FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU
4. CPSR.ORG /CPSR/CLINTON
5. FedWorld Online System 703-321-8020 8-N-1 or:
Telnet fedworld.doc.gov
Telnet fedworld.gov or:
FTP ftp.fedworld.gov /w-house
6. GOPHER.TAMU.EDU 11/.dir/president.dir
Notes: The following are notes on how to log in and get
information from the above sites.
1. Office for Information Technology at the University of
North Carolina maintains the full collection of White
House electronic releases available for search with WAIS and
also accessible via Gopher and FTP.
1.a WAIS
(:source
:version 3
:database-name "/home3/wais/White-House-Papers" :ip-
address "152.2.22.81"
:ip-name "sunsite.unc.edu"
:tcp-port 210
:cost 0.00
:cost-unit :free
:maintainer "pjones@sunsite.unc.edu"
:description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5 on
Feb 27 15:16:16 1993 by pjones@sunsite.unc.edu These are the
White House Press Briefings and other postings dealing with
William Jefferson Clinton and Albert Gore as well as members
of the President's Cabinet and the first lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton, Chelsea, Socks and others in Washington DC. Dee Dee
Meyers and George Stephanopoulos. Other good words:
United States of America, Bill Al Tipper Democrats USA
US These files are also available via anonymous ftp
from sunsite.unc.edu The files of type filename used in
the index were:
/home3/ftp/pub/academic/political-science/whitehouse-
papers/1993 ")
Folks without WAIS clients or gophers that act as WAIS
clients may telnet to sunsite.unc.edu and login as swais
to access this information via WAIS.
1.b GOPHER is a distributed menu system for information access on the
Internet developed at the University of Minnesota. gophers are
client-server implementations and various gopher clients are
available for nearly any computing platform. You may now use
gopher clients to access the White House Papers and other
political information on SunSITE.unc.edu's new gopher server.
You may also add links from your local gopher server to
SunSITE for access to the White House Papers.
For gopher server keepers and adventurous clients to access
SunSITE you need only know that we use the standard gopher
port 70 and that our internet address is SunSITE.unc.edu
(152.2.22.81). Point there and you'll see the references to
the Politics areas.
For folks without gopher clients can telnet to sunsite.unc.edu
to try out gopher access. You need to have access to internet
telnet and:
telnet sunsite.unc.edu
login: gopher
The rest is very straight forward. Browsing options end with a
directory mark (/), searching options end with an question mark
(?).
There's plenty of on-line help available.
2. No special instructions.
3. The CLINTON@MARIST log files which contain all the official
administration releases distributed through the MIT servers
are available via anonymous FTP. These logs contain in
addition to the official releases, the posts that comprise the
ongoing discussion conducted by the list subscribers.
To obtain the logs:
FTP MARISTB.MARIST.EDU - the logs are in the CLINTON directory
and are named CLINTON LOG9208 thru CLINTON LOGyymm where yymm
stands for the current year and month. Problems should be
directed to my attention: URLS@MARISTC.BITNET or
URLS@VM.MARIST.EDU.
Posted by Lee Sakkas - owner, CLINTON@MARIST
4. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is
providing all Clinton documents on technology and privacy
at the CPSR Internet Library, available via
FTP/WAIS/Gopher at cpsr.org /cpsr/clinton (and in other
folders as relevant). For email access, send a message
with the word "help" at the 1st line of text to
listserv@cpsr.org.
5. The FedWorld Computer System, operated by the National Technical
Information Service, archives White House papers in a
traditional BBS type file library. Connect to FedWorld by
calling (703) 321-8020. No parity, eight data bits and one stop
bit (N-8-1). FedWorld accommodates baud speeds of up to 9,600.
It is also possible to Telnet to FedWorld at FedWorld.doc.gov or
fedworld.gov (no caps). FTP to FedWorld at ftp.fedworld.gov.
White House papers are located in the W-House library of files.
To access this library from the main FedWorld menu,
enter <f s w-house>. Files are named with the first four digits
being the release month and day (e.g. 0323XXX.txt). Some
standard abbreviations after the date include:
rem - Remarks by the President
pc - Press Conference transcript
pr - Press Release
AM - AM Press Briefing
PM - PM Press Briefing
sch - The President's public schedule
spch- Text of major speeches.
These files are saved in ASCII format. Files can be viewed
online by requesting to download a file and then selecting
(L)ist as the download protocol. This will display the file a
screen at a time. White House papers are kept in the above
format for up to two months. Papers more than two months old
are compressed using Pkzip into a single file that contains all
of the files for that month (e.g. 0193.zip contains all papers
released during January 1993). In addition to White Documents,
FedWorld also provides a gateway to more than 100 government
funded BBSs and computer systems.
6. Texas A&M University GOPHER Server makes available White House
press releases and other documents. This archive includes
information from 1992 until the present time and is updated
as new documents are released. Gopher users can reach the
Texas A&M server by choosing it from their local server's list
of other gophers, or by pointing their gopher clients to
GOPHER.TAMU.EDU.
After connecting to the A&M server, take the following path to
reach the White House menus:
"Browse Information by Subject" -->
"Political Science" -->
"Information from the White House"
Gopher maintainers and other intrepid souls are welcome to point
directly to the A&M White House archive. The server is
GOPHER.TAMU.EDU and the path is 11/.dir/president.dir.
IV. HOW DO I SIGN UP FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS BY THE WHITE HOUSE?
The White House Communications office is distributing press releases
over an experimental system developed during the campaign at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
You can obtain copies of all the press releases from a wide variety of
on-line services or discussion groups devoted to either national
politics in general or President Clinton in particular. These are
listed in sections I and II.
Section IIc explains how you can sign up to receive press releases
directly from the experimental MIT system by using an automated email
server. The present system was not designed to handle high levels of
message traffic. A more powerful system will become available in due
course, and in the meantime, it would be appreciated if you used this
service sparingly. One appropriate current use is secondary
redistribution and archiving. If you use it, you will be carried forward
when the more powerful system that replaces it.
IVa. WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES
1. On USENET/NETNEWS, electronic publications are found on a variety
of groups:
Direct Distribution
alt.politics.clinton
alt.politics.org.misc
alt.politics.reform
alt.politics.usa.misc
alt.news-media
alt.activism
talk.politics.misc
Indirect Distribution
misc.activism.progressive
cmu.soc.politics
assocs.clinton-gore-92
2. On CompuServe: GO WHITEHOUSE. Also, see the Democratic Forum: Go
Democrats
3. On America Online: keyword WHITEHOUSE or THE WHITEHOUSE or CLINTON
4. On Prodigy, jump WHITE HOUSE MEMO.
5. On The WELL: type whitehouse
6. On MCI: type VIEW WHITE HOUSE
7. On Fidonet: See Echomail WHITEHOUSE
8. On Peacenet or Econet: See pol.govinfo.usa.
9. On The Meta Network: Go Whitehouse
10. On GEnie: Type WHITEHOUSE or WHRT, or MOVE 1600
IVb. NOTES ON WIDELY AVAILABLE SOURCES
2. CompuServe's White House Forum (GO WHITEHOUSE) is devoted to
discussion of the Clinton administration's policies and
activities. The forum's library consists of news releases and
twice daily media briefings from the White House Office of Media
Affairs. CompuServe members can exchange information and
opinions with each other in the 17 sections in the forum's
message area. The message board spans a broad range of topics,
including international and United Nations activities, defense,
health care, the economy and the deficit, housing and
urban development, the environment, and education and national
service.
CompuServe's Democratic Forum (GO DEMOCRATS) is the Democratic
Party's online information service covering the activities of
the Clinton administration. The sysops of the Democratic Forum
work for the Democratic National Committee, and are directly
involved in managing the forum and responding to online
questions. The Democratic Forum provides access to documents
from the White House Office of Media Affairs, with vigorous
discussion and debate in the message sections about the impact
of the Clinton Administration's policies and proposals. The
Democratic Forum also holds a regular weekly online conference
with special guests on current topics.
3. On America Online, the posts are sent to the White House Forum,
located in the News & Finance Department of the service or
accessible via keywords: "white house" or "clinton". The White
House Forum on America Online contains the press releases from
the White House, divided into the categories "Appointments",
"Budget", "Congress", "Education", "Economy", "Foreign Policy",
"Health Care", "Housing", "Labor", "Law and Order", "Meetings &
Speeches", "Proclamations", "Technology", and "Vice President".
The area features a message board so you can discuss the
releases with other AOL members, a searchable database for easy
retrieval of releases that interest you, a Library for longer
releases from the White House, and a library that members can
upload files of interest for other members.
America OnLine now offers full access to the Usenet Newsgroups,
Gopher and WAIS servers mentioned throughout this document.
4. On Prodigy, WHITE HOUSE MEMO contains all the public documents
released by the White House. This service is offered as a PLUS
feature.
6. MCI Mail users access daily information on the administration's
programs provided by the White House through MCI Mail bulletin
boards. The available boards are: WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC, WHITE
HOUSE FOREIGN, WHITE HOUSE SOCIAL, WHITE HOUSE SPEECHES and
WHITE HOUSE NEWS. A listing of these boards can also be
obtained by simply typing VIEW WHITE HOUSE at the COMMAND
prompt.
9. On The Meta Network, material is posted in the White house
conference and is accessible via keywords (matching on document
titles and subject categories) as well as full text search.
Discussions on specific initiatives take place in special
interest forums, e.g. health, technology, and reinventing
government.
10. GEnie's White House RoundTable has been established to
distribute and discuss the official press releases and files
relating to the White House and the Clinton Administration. The
files library holds all of the press releases on the official
mailing list, and the Bulletin Board has Categories set up with
topics relating to all aspects of the Administration and
Executive Branch of government. Letters to the White House can
be entered easily online with a menu option on the WHITEHOUSE
page.
IVc. DIRECT EMAIL DISTRIBUTION
If you don't have access to the these accounts or if you would prefer to
receive the releases via email, then this section details how to
sign up for this service. The server is not set up to answer email
letters, comments or requests for specific information. To reach this
MIT server, send email:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: Help
The server works by reading the subject line of the incoming message and
taking whatever action that line calls for. If you want to sign up to
automatically receive press releases, then your subject line would begin
with the word RECEIVE. You can then specify what kind of information
you are interested in receiving. The categories of information are:
ECONOMY
Get releases related to the economy such as budget
news, technology policy review, etc.
FOREIGN
Get releases related to foreign policy such as
statements on Bosnian airdrop, Haitian refugee status,
etc.
HEALTH Get releases related to health care policy, without
receiving any other social issues. Use this instead
of social.
SOCIAL
Get releases related to social issues like National
Service (Student Loan) program, abortion, welfare
reform, etc.
SPEECHES
All speeches made by the President and important
speeches made by other Administration officials.
NEWS
Transcripts of press conferences released by the White
House Communications office, as well as the
President's remarks in photo ops and other Q&A
sessions.
ALL All of the above
So, if you wanted to sign up to get releases related to the economy
your email message would look like this:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: RECEIVE ECONOMY
When you send a signup message to the clinton-info server, it sends you
back a status message letting you know what distribution streams you are
signed up for. If you ever want to check on what groups you are signed
up for send the following message:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: STATUS
*****You can stop receiving email releases by sending a REMOVE message
to the clinton-info server. The word REMOVE would be followed by
whatever distribution stream you wanted to drop. If you wanted to stop
receiving message about the ECONOMY then your mail would look like this:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: REMOVE ECONOMY
You could substitute SOCIAL, FOREIGN, HEALTH, SPEECHES, NEWS or ALL for
ECONOMY in the above message and you would be dropped from that
distribution list. If you send the subject line REMOVE ALL, then you
will be taken off the email distribution system all together and will
not receive further releases of any kind.
You can also ask for help from the automated server. Send an email
query as follows:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: HELP
The server will respond by sending you a detailed form that will guide
you through the process of signing up for the various distribution
streams. As you will quickly discover, there is a automatic form
processing interface that parallel the quick and easy subject line
commands discussed here. More detailed help is available by sending an
email query as follows:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: Please Help!
Finally, if you want to search and retrieve documents, but you do not
have access to the retrieval methods discussed in section II, you can do
this via email through the MIT server. You can obtain the WAIS query
form by sending an email query as follows:
To: Clinton-Info@Campaign92.Org
Subject: WAIS
Once you have identified the documents that you want, be careful not
to request them all at once, because you may be sent a message
containing all the documents and this message may be too big for some
mail delivery systems between the email server and you.
D. EMAIL SUMMARY SERVICE
The Extension Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides a
daily summary of White House electronic publications.
1. Subscriptions
To subscribe to the USDA Extension Service White House Summary service,
send a message to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
subscribe wh-summary
To Unsubscribe from the USDA Extension Service White House Summary
service, send a message to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe wh-summary
2. Document Retrieval
To request a specific document from the daily summaries, send a message
to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
send white-house #####
(where ##### is the request number for the document)
3. Document Search
A user-friendly search facility is also available to search the
white-house documents archived at ESUSDA.GOV. To search, send a message
to:
almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
search white-house keyword1 keyword2
4. Catalogue of Summaries and Documents
Back issues and the catalog of the summaries or the documents contained
at ESUSDA.GOV can also be retrieved through our almanac server. To get
the summary catalog, send a message
To: almanac@ESUSDA.GOV
In the body of the message, type:
send wh-summary catalog
5. Further Information
If you have any questions about Almanac, please contact:
wh-admin@ESUSDA.GOV
V. CAN I HEAR/DOWNLOAD THE PRESIDENT'S SATURDAY MORNING RADIO ADDRESS?
0. What is the POTUS Saturday Address to the Nation (PSAN)?
The President of the United States (POTUS) makes an Address to the
Nation every Saturday at 10 AM. This is in continuation of the tradition
started by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (with the famous Fireside
Chats), and revived by President Ronald Reagan. The POTUS Saturday Address
to the Nation is referred to by the acronym "PSAN".
President Clinton's Saturday morning Radio Address to the nation can be heard
on many local stations throughout the country. The address is carried live
by some stations and broadcast on tape-delay by others. Please check with
your local stations to determine if and when you can hear the address in your
area. You can also write to the White House Office of Media Affairs, Attn:
Saturday Radio Address, The White House, Washington, DC 20500 (snail mail
only) for a listing of local area broadcasters.
QUESTIONS ABOUT DOWNLOADING PSAN AUDIO FILES:
-------------------------
1. How can I download the PSAN audio files?
2. What audio format is used for the PSAN audio files?
3. How large are the audio files?
4. How can I convert the audio files to other formats?
5. How can I contact the President on the Internet?
ANSWERS:
-------------------------
1 . How can I download the PSAN audio files?
The PSANs since October 16, 1993 have been digitized, converted to audio
files, and uploaded to a site on the Internet. These files may be freely
downloaded without cost or restriction.
The files are located on "ftp.uu.net" (IP Address 192.48.96.9) in the
directory "/government/usa/executive/saturday-addresses".
Use anonymous ftp to access and download these files. Be sure to use the
"binary mode" for transferring the files. For additional details
concerning the use of ftp, contact your site system administrator.
2. What audio format is used for the PSAN audio files?
The file format is that used by Sun Microsystems as the default for
digitizing voice. The file contains a header and digitized audio samples.
The voice is sampled 8000 times per second, at a resolution of eight bits
per sample. The u-law (mu-law) encoding is used.
For additional details regarding the formats of audio files, please refer to
the Audio_File_Formats FAQ in /pub/usenet-by-group/comp.dsp on rtfm.mit.edu
(IP Address 18.70.0.209).
3. How large are the audio files?
The audio file format used takes up 8 Kbytes per second of audio. The
PSANs are about five to seven minutes in length. Thus, the audio
files are between 2.4 and 4 Mbytes in length.
4. How can I convert the audio files to other formats?
Please see the Audio_File_Formats FAQ mentioned above in Question 2.
VI. HOW DO I SUBMIT UPDATES FOR THIS FAQ?
Please send corrections, deletion and additions to this FAQ to:
faq-update@whitehouse.gov