Offering Both the Nice and the Nasty, E-Mail Lists Surge in Usage

And, finally, this: "LISTEN and close your pie hole when you go to the ANC meetings. . . . If you have something to say to me, you seem to know where I live. I'll be waiting."

You don't often hear that over the garden fence.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, the e-mail lists have emerged as a marketplace of the minuscule. The ease of posting allows someone cleaning out a cupboard or a garage to offer up such free-for-the-taking treasures as half a bag of rice (Takoma Park), a jar of small screws (Capitol Hill) and "a broken wooden duck toy found on the sidewalk" (Freecycle.com, for people who hate to throw anything away).

The vast majority of message traffic, though, is consumed with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor commerce that used to take a phone call or a thumbtacked posting on a bulletin board. Babysitters, handymen, yoga gurus and those who seek their services have found the lists to be a potent clearinghouse.

Rhodessa Bender of the Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria recently posted the name of a well-qualified nanny on her neighborhood e-mail list as a favor for a friend. Giving out her own phone number, she discovered, was a mistake.

"I was just putting out some feelers, and I was inundated," she said. "It is a very powerful tool."

Local officials and politicians have noticed that muscle. The e-mail lists have become a favorite way for police precinct officers to send out neighborhood alerts. Candidates routinely post appeals on them, and officeholders use them to burnish their constituent-service credentials. As a D.C. Council member, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was famous for trolling Ward 4 e-mail lists for pothole complaints and other grousing about city services.

"I put out on the Listserv that half of my street didn't get the new glass recycling cans, and Fenty suddenly chimed in that he would make a call," recalled Virginia Jarrett, 63, who lives in Chevy Chase in the District. "In a couple of days, they brought the rest of the cans."

Jarrett, a retired fundraiser, is a lifelong fixture in her Chevy Chase neighborhood in the District, a block captain who frequently swaps the news of the day along sidewalks and produce aisles.

She first learned about e-mail groups about two years ago, when a dog she was taking care of escaped from her yard. A neighbor suggested skipping the usual stapling of fliers onto telephone poles in favor of posting a lost-dog alert on the Chevy Chase Listserv, which has about 2,000 participants. She has been Citizen Inbox ever since.

"It's wonderful -- it makes us a village. Sometimes I stay online all evening," Jarrett said.

In Cleveland Park, the e-mail group has swelled to more than 5,100 subscribers, making it one of the largest in the country, according to Peggy Robin and Bill Adler, its husband-and-wife founders. For years, it was a casual forum in which anyone could post just about anything. But that changed in 2000, when Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez briefly stayed at a Cleveland Park home before being returned to Havana. Suddenly, local topics were swamped by a flood of "Free Elian" postings, largely from South Florida.