 TERMS
OF SERVICE
Our Terms of Service cover four
components: (a) spam, (b) content,
(c) payment and (d) right of
refusal of service.
I.
Our policy on spam
We are confident
that, as an educated and intelligent Internet user, you will fully understand our position
on unsolicited commercial email, or spam. We also know you will do all in your power to
help us implement our policy, for the benefit of us all.
An informal survey of
Internet service providers in early 1999 revealed that spam is costing the Internet
services industry tens of millions of dollars every month in bandwidth, customer service
and systems administrations. Our own tolerance for this pernicious practice is zero.
But just in case you
still need convincing why you, as an email publisher, should also take an active
role in trying to wipe out spam, we invite you to ponder this uncomfortable fact: spam is
damaging consumers' opinions of the email medium. As people's mailboxes get more and more
clogged up with unsolicited messages, they will become less and less receptive even to
productive uses of email. When this happens, e-publishers are among those who may suffer
the most.
For our part, we'll
do all we can to protect both our list owners and their subscribers from the plague of
unwanted commercial messages. Our servers may not be the source, intermediary or
destination address involved in the transmission of spam, flames or mail bombs. Your list
address or any URL pointing to information about your list hosted with us may not be
referenced in any unsolicited commercial messages distributed via e-mail, newsgroups or
facsimile. We will ban all offending parties (or even entire domains) from our system, and
where necessary, bill them for all costs involved.
We never have access
to any list we host on behalf of our clients on our servers. We regard your list as
strictly confidential and it would be unthinkable for us to hire it or divulge its
contents to any third party. Click here for more on our privacy
policy.
To complement our
continual vigilance and vigorous measures against unsolicited commercial email, we ask
you, our valued customer, to help us as well by strictly adopting the following procedures
at all times:
1. All Lists
Must Be 100% Opt-in
We ask our clients to
ensure that every single one of the addresses on their mailing lists is opt-in.
Since the precise
meaning of this term seems to be open to a number of different interpretations in Internet
circles, we will define exactly what we mean by this: The owner of every address on an
opt-in list must have personally and unambiguously requested that his or her name be
placed there.
No exception to this
rule can be allowed.This means that you cannot subscribe people to your list merely
because they are customers of yours, they have corresponded with you in the past or have
requested information from you by email or on your website. "Opt-in" implies
that you have their explicit permission to send them your publication.
However, if you do
have a list of people with whom you have had a prior relationship, but have not yet
formally subscribed to your publication, we can assist you, through our managed services,
to convert it into a genuine opt-in list. Your revised list may be a smaller one, but it
will be more tightly focused since the people that remain will have a real interest in
your publication or the product or service you are promoting.
We also cannot allow
you to use unsolicited email messages to advertise any publication hosted on our servers
to to invite new subscriptions. We will gladly advise you regarding effective and ethical
methods of promoting your list. Much helpful information will also be available soon
through our List Promote website. You could also hire us to promote your list on your
behalf, through our powerful but economical list promotion services.
Should we discover
that any list owner using our hosting services willfully adds addresses to his or her
subscriber list without the explicit permission of the owner of those addresses, we will
immediately terminate our contract with the offending list owner. The same action will be
taken in the case of list owners who use unsolicited email to promote their lists. When we
are forced to do this, we will not reimburse such clients for any unused services that
have been paid for. We also reserve the right to bill the offending party for any damages
caused as a result of these unethical actions.
2. Protecting
Your Subscribers from Spam
It's not enough to
concern ourselves only with our own reputation and interests. Both we, as your list
hosting company, and you, as the list owner, have to actively involve ourselves to protect
your subscribers, who are surely valuable to you, from the inconvenience and harassment of
unsolicited commercial email.
First and foremost,
it's your responsibility as a list owner to ensure that your subscriber list is protected
so that no unauthorized party can ever have access to it. Our list hosting software makes
this a simple task. We strongly advise that all list owners leave their settings as
initialized to ensure that no problems occur.
Secondly, it's also
your duty to take whatever steps are necessary to protect your subscribers from being
harassed by spam messages. For obvious reasons, the problem is more acute in the case of
two-way discussion lists, where subscribers are invited to post messages, complying with
certain requirements, to the list.
Owners of discussion
lists should take the following precautions:
Send a welcome or
introductory message to all new subscribers, in which you clearly indicate what subjects
are acceptable for discussion on your list, and on the other hand, what you regard as
spam.
If your list is
moderated, never share your password with others. If you accidentally publicize your
password, please change it immediately or email
customer service to have it changed for you.
Even if your list
is unmoderated, please monitor posts to the list as much as possible and immediately
remove any subscriber who ignores instructions by posting spam messages to the list. At
the same time, forward a copy of the offending email message (with headers intact) to abuse@listhost.net. As we've already indicated, we
won't hesitate to block proven "spammers" permanently from all the lists that we
host.
It's also a good
idea to have one or more active list subscribers serve as back-ups in case you are ever
away for an extended time.
3. Privacy
Policy
For all publicly
accessible lists, we respectfully ask that all list owners provide a privacy policy in the
welcome message new subscribers receive and/or on their web site.
II. Content
Our service may be
used for lawful purposes only. Transmission of any information, data or material in
violation of any United States Federal, State or City law or any Canadian law is
prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to: material covered under International
Copyright Law; material which may be considered to be threatening, obscene or promoting
hate crimes or any violation of human rights; and material protected against public
distribution under contractual or other laws.
Our service may not
be used for promotion or condoning of pornography, nudity and/or adult-oriented
merchandising.
In addition, our
service may not be used to promote, advertise, or otherwise disseminate information about
bulk email services or software.
Our service may not
be used to promote, advertise, condone or represent any content falling into any of the
above-described categories. This covers acceptance of advertising from sites that may
violate our content policies or inclusion of links to sites that may violate our content
policies.
We will be the sole
arbiter as to what may constitute a violation of this provision of our Terms of Service.
III. Payment
It is the list
owner's responsibility to ensure our billing department has the most current contact
information on file and that preferred payment method is kept up-to-date.
All accounts must be
prepaid in advance for services ordered. Failure to make payment by due date will result
in administrative and financing charges. Failure to make payment after due notice will
result in suspension of services and any accounts in arrears for 30 days or longer will be
terminated.
In the case of a
check being returned NSF, a credit card number being declined or a charge being declined,
the list owner will be charged any fees incurred by SSM along with administrative costs
for rebilling and financing charges. Future payment problems may result in a request to
change method of payment. Failure to pay associated charges may result in termination of
account.
IV. Refusal of Service
We reserve the right
to cancel or refuse service at our sole discretion to any paid customer or any user of our
service. |
