"I'm gay!" This announcement by TV actress Ellen DeGeneres during her prime time "Ellen" show might not, on the face of it, seem a signal event in the history of online commerce. But it was. Ellen's "outing" on the April 30, 1997, ABC broadcast fueled a nationwide controversy which spilled over to the show's corporate sponsors. One, the venerable JCPenney department store chain of Plano, Texas, found its fledgling presence on the World Wide Web inundated with e-mail of a kind and quantity it had never seen before. Anti-gay critics flamed DeGeneres and belted JCPenney for supporting her show. Supporters were just as vehement. Not exactly cardigans and cookware.

For technologists, though, the real news was how JCPenney's e-mail system handled the fuss. At the time, Middle America's favorite apparel retailer was experimenting with a pilot version of EchoMail, a new type of automated e-mail classification and response system from General Interactive, a young Cambridge, Mass., software firm. Not only did EchoMail go on routing and replying to regular queries about orders and returns, but it recognized that the "Ellen" messages didn't fall into a preset category.