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Unsolicited email (aka Spam) is network abuse!

Msen reserves the right to terminate an account without notice for what we consider unacceptable use of network resources. This covers spam messages sent directly via email, redirected through Msen's email servers, sent to Majordomo mailing lists, or posted to Usenet newsgroups. Msen may charge Msen customers $100.00 plus $150.00/hour cleanup costs per occurrence. These charges apply, even if we choose to terminate the account.

Email address forgery

Forgery of the from or return email address to one not owned by the user will be considered SPAM and subject to these same penalties. This will be reguardless of the number of recipients. If the mail was sent from your PPP login session, you are responsible for it.

Off network spam advertising your web site

Use of an email account not opperated by Msen (ie. Hotmail.com) for the purpose of advertising a web site hosted at one of Msen.com's servers violates this policy.

Open Mail Relay

Spammers search the Internet for machines that have been configured to "trust everyone" when sending email. This was the common setting in the early, research days of the Intenet, but is dangerous in today's commercial market. Today, one must configure mail machines running SMTP server sofware (MS Exchange, Sendmail, QMail, Lotus Notes) to deny relaying email from outside IP addresses. Failure to do so allows spammers to use your machine as a "spam exploder", turning one mail message to your machine into 100 spams sent to various email addresses. All of your available bandwidth is used in sending this junk mail.

* Therefore, any machine found as an open relay, before or after an incident, will be charged a fine.

* It must deny joe@aol.com sending mail to mary@hotmail.com by sending it to your machine.

* If the mail was sent or relayed by your PPP login session, you are responsible for it.

Guidelines for sending mass mail

* If you are sending mass mailings, you must be able to show to Msen:
  • registration by each recipient on a guest book or web-board
  • outside registration at a non-online event: Ie. Attendance and registration at a Novell Netware seminar is sufficient for receiving product announcements about Novell products.
  • Ownership of a Majordomo mailing list maintained at Msen

  • * The mailing must include the source of the address in the body of the message, preferably at the top. Majordomo lists are exempt, as they are self documenting.
    For example:
    You received this because you attended the Internet Show at the Novi Expo Center on 3/25/97 and registered an email address then. or
    You received this because you registered in the guest-book at http://www.mydomain.com.
    * You must remove anyone from your list when they request it.

    * The use of a "targeted" list purchased or received from another source is not allowed. These professional spam lists are not targeted, and are not your work in collecting a contact list of interested customers.


    Msen will attempt to filter and slow the amount of spam coming to our customers from outside machines. This is difficult as many of the offenders move accounts weekly, and make pre-emptive filtering useless. As the internet community gets more and more fed up with spam, more options are being produced to filter mail.

    August 2000  Msen has started adding a header line to email when we "suspect" that a piece of email may be spam. This is an automated system using the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), ORBS, and the Dialup Users List (DUL). This detection is done by the ip addresses found in the headers or envelope of the email message.

    X-Spam-Suspected-by-Msen-because-of-Envelope: [207.69.200.226]_orbs
    X-Spam-Suspected-by-Msen-because-of-Header: [210.155.14.194]_rbl

    are examples of the header line that is added to the email. These detection services do provide "false positives", especially ORBS. Therefore, instead of throwing out the email, Msen has chosen to only tag it as possible spam, and leave it up to the user to throw out the email based on the recommendation. One known false positive is Amazon.com's purchase receipts. That example alone serves as case and point on why we do not automatically throw out suspected spam. Currently about 6% of mail is being tagged.

    To make use of these headers, one uses filters in their email software. The instructions for Netscape 4.7 are available. Unix users would use procmail for filtering.


    Guidelines for posting to Usenet

    * Limit your posting to 5 newsgroups or less. People don't want to see the same stuff over and over again.

    * If you are posting to a binaries group, your posting must contain a binary that is relevant.

    * If you are posting an adult picture, post only in the alt.binaries.pictures.* groups. Rec.nude is not for pictures.

    * Limit your posting to once per week.

    * 99% of Usenet newsgroups have charters prohibiting advertisements. If the newsgroup charter denies posting of advertisements to the newsgroup, you are limited to a five line advertising trailer, ie. signature, in your message, which must be a contributing response to a current discussion. Starting a new topic thread to advertise you product is not allowed.

    The more restrictive policy of the charter or these rules will be enforced.
    Permission for use given to other service providers without prior request.


    Other opinions on Spam:
    IETF RUN Working Group - Don't Spew
    IETF RUN Working Group - Internet Advertising
    Spam.Abuse.Net - Fight Spam on the Internet!

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