Acceptable Use Guidelines
Probably the best guideline for following our Terms and Conditions is to check with us before doing something you have doubts about. Often we can come up with a way to accomplish your goal without problems.
Sometimes knowing what is acceptable use is a bit tricky. Everyone understands why we wouldn't give somebody a viagra SPAMer a warning before shutting off their account. It is a little harder to understand why we might not be happy with somebody for sending 1000 fundraising emails for the orphan's fund.
Avoiding the appearance of SPAM
Because SPAM is such a problem for so many people, many people are taking drastic measures. For example "blackhole lists". If 3 people report you for SPAMing, our server goes on a list of SPAMers and everyone that uses our server loses the ability to send email to AOL, Earthlink, Mindspring and many others. Getting off these lists usually takes at least a week.
It is perfectly OK to send 1000 people an email message as long as they have all agreed to receive such messages. It is not enough that they haven't told you that they do not want such messages.
In practical terms, when you create a listserv, use the option that invites people to join, but doesn't subscribe them until they reply.
Protecting your passwords
We are pretty compulsive about security.
There are millions of people using the internet. Even if only 1 in 1000 are bad people with skills, there are tens of thousands of dangerous people using the internet. Simple scripts make it possible to probe every computer on the internet automatically. Our security logs show we are probed about every 10 minutes.
Please do not share your password with anyone. If somebody else in your organization needs an account, we'll be happy to give them their own password.
Individual Email Privacy
Generally, you get an email account with us because you work with a non profit organization. Our loyalty is that organization. Don't count on your files or your email being private. If your boss asks us to look at your email or to forward it someplace else or to cut off your access without notice. We generally will do this
This sort of thing doesn't come up often, but it does come up. We aren't likely to support repeated or gratitious snooping and it is always possible that we'll decline to do something especially creepy, but you shouldn't count on this.
Command logging
For security reasons all commands everyone runs are logged to /var/log/auth.log.
We rationalize our logging by:
- Logging and monitoring all our snooping (everyone with snoopying powers gets a daily report listing all snooping)
- Not casually looking @ stuff like email
- Claiming that our systems are supposed to be used primarily to put information out on the net for everyone to use.