In a sign that the 2008 campaign is (finally!) receding into the past, the total number of usable letters submitted to The Times for the week beginning November 16th dropped below 1000 for the first time since voting day.

But that doesn't mean writers have veered off the election topic completely.  For the third week in a row, fallout from the passage of Proposition 8 generated more mail than any other topic in the news (though this week's 350 letters pales next to last week's 665.) 

While letters about Prop. 8 dropped almost by half, the volume of mail about a possible bailout for Detroit nearly doubled this week, to 110.

Last week The Times received 1281 usable letters, 654 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Proposition 8: 350 letters;
• Bailing out Detroit: 110 letters;
• Barack Obama: 86 letters, including responses to this story about the president elect's family and this story about what Obama's win means for black men;
• California wildfires: 75 letters; and
• Holocaust: 33 letters, responding to this Op-Ed by former Israeli parliament speaker Avraham Burg.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns--more on that later--and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.