Policies - Msen Internet Services

Account Changes
Adult Pages
Domain Registration
Session Timeouts
Unsolicited Email (spam) Spam tagging

Account Changes

For customer protection, Msen does not accept account changes (upgrades, downgrades and closes) via e-mail or telephone.

When Msen closes an account, we delete all file information from our server. After our backups have cycled, deleted information is unrecoverable. For this reason, we want to make sure that such requests come from our customer, not someone impersonating them.

Please fax your request to 248-740-0690, or mail it to:
Msen Inc.
P.O. Box 4725
Troy, MI 48099-4725

Domain Registration

Msen normally handles the proper registration of domains for our clients or transfer of existing domains to Msen.

Msen lists itself as the "Technical Contact" allowing us to properly maintain server information for the domain. The customer is listed as both "Administrative" and "Billing" contact.

Unsolicited email (aka Spam) is network abuse!

Msen reserves the right to terminate an account without notice for what Msen considers unacceptable use of network resources. This covers unsolicited messages sent directly via email, redirected through Msen's email servers, sent to Majordomo mailing lists, or posted to Usenet newsgroups. Msen charges offenders $100.00 plus $150.00 per 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 abuse and subject to these same penalties. This will be regardless 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 operated by Msen (i.e. 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 Internet, but is dangerous in today's commercial market. Today, one must configure mail machines running SMTP server software (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.

Open Mailing Lists

Mailing lists should be configured to prohibit posts except by list members. This will prevent a spammer from using your mailing list to send spam to all list members.

Guidelines for sending mass email

There are legitimate uses for mass mailings: Many companies use mailing lists to keep in touch with customers.

If you are sending mass mailings, you must be able to show to Msen one of the following:

Registration by each recipient on a guest book, web-board, direct email or on paper, requesting email information.

Outside registration at a non-online event where the event materials clearly state that email addresses will be used for promotional use. (i.e. Attendance and registration at a Novell Netware seminar is not sufficient for receiving product announcements about Novell products unless the registration materials clearly state that the email address will be used for them.)

Ownership of a Majordomo mailing list maintained at Msen where the recipients have signed up for the list.

E-mail addresses in the list must be deliverable. Any account which generates 15 or more "Undeliverable" or "Bounced" messages in a single 24 hour period will be considered abusive.

The email 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. Examples of properly formatted email might contain one of these at the top of the message:

You are receiving this email because you attended the Internet Show at the Novi Expo Center on 11/14/2000 and registered an email address then.

You received this because you registered in the guest-book at http://www.mydomain.com.

You must promptly remove anyone from your list when they request it.

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

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 postings 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.

Msen insists that adult web pages be tagged in their <HEAD> section with the meta tag that defines the content of the page to browsers that are aware of the PICS protocol. Since the standard is an open and undefined one, we have chosen two self rating systems:

RSACi (now ICRA)

SafeSurf
"The RSACi system has been incorporated into the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer 3.0+ and into the leading software blocking device, CyberPatrol. Netscape honors RSaci and SafeSurf via their Help->Netwatch service."

How to properly construct adult pages:

Read the documentation at http://www.rsac.org/ and

Install the RSACi meta tag on all adult pages of
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l comment "RSACi North America Server" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
Change the bold text, per the instrunctions at the website, for nudity, sex, violence and language.

Read the documentation at http://www.safesurf.com.

Install the SafeSurf meta tag on all adult pages of
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.0 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 8 SS~~004 7))'> Change the bold text, per the instructions at the website. The given example identifies a page as "Adults Only" and "Erotic frontal nudity".

Place the icons on your homepage so that parents know that you have done your work to protect their children. See examples below.

Either place the meta tags also on the "You must be 18+" page so children never get to even see the page, or place a notice simular to the following near the adult or child buttons.

All pages below here are
restricted with the RSACi
and SafeSurf systems.

Read up on other Net filterering browsers, and install the appropriate Meta tags if they do not support the RSACi or SafeSurf.

Failure to take reasonable steps to mark your pages may lead to account termination.

Msen provides a functional test page (without any actual potentially offensive material) to test the filtering software of your browser at adult_test.html.

Account Changes Adult Pages Domain Registration Session Timeouts Unsolicited Email (spam) Spam tagging