VA E-Mail in Manila

Dig deep into the Veterans Affairs Department's grand cloud e-mail plan that I wrote about today and you discover that this effort to manage 600,000 mailboxes includes 251 in Manila, the capital of the Philippines.

The Veterans Benefits Administration operates an office in Manila to help Filipino veterans who served under U.S. command during World War II.

The Manila VBA office has a staff of eight Americans and 137 Filipinos. It disburses $12.5 million a month in payments to more than 18,000 beneficiaries, and is the successor to the U.S. Veterans Bureau office that opened in the city in 1922.

Consider this your interesting historical fact for the day. Imagine what those civil servants in 1922 would have thought of the cloud.