Use Policy

Subscription to any forum hosted by Mississippi Main Street Association constitutes acceptance of the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy.

1. Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE)
The use of the Mississippi Main Street Association forum server to distribute unsolicited commercial email is normally prohibited. The exception is where the message is entirely appropriate to a forum and, even then, only at the discretion of the forum owner. Check first unless you are certain that your email will be acceptable – UCE will do your cause more harm than good.

UCE is defined as any email seeking to sell a product or service and/or to promote a commercial organization sent to parties who have not indicated in advance their willingness to receive such email.

Subscription to any forum on the MMSA server indicates a willingness to receive occasional messages announcing new services of the MMSA – in other words, emails originating from the MMSA owners and administrators cannot be considered UCE.

Senders of UCE may be blocked from further access to the MMSA forum without notice or explanation.

2. Spamming
Spamming forums is absolutely prohibited with no exceptions.

Spamming is defined as sending substantially the same message to multiple forums (ie; cross posting) whether or not the message is sent to all forums at the same time or several forums over a period of time.

Senders of spam may be blocked from further access to the MMSA forum server without notice or explanation.

3. Unacceptable behavior
Any behavior on a forum hosted by Mississippi Main Street Association which, in the opinion of the MMSA administrators, is unacceptable may result in the offender being blocked from further access to the MMSA forum server without notice or explanation or such other action as the administrators and/or list owner deem appropriate.

Unacceptable behavior includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Sending email with an invalid From: or Reply-to: address.
  • Harassing, threatening, embarrassing or causing distress, unwanted attention or discomfort to any person or entity.
  • Posting sexually explicit information or other content which is deemed by the Mississippi Main Street Association to be offensive.
  • Transmitting any unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, or hateful content or content which is racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, or which infringes upon the rights of any third party, as determined by Mississippi Main Street Association.
  • Impersonating any person, including but not limited to, an official of the Mississippi Main Street Association or an information provider, or communicating under a false name or a name that you are not entitled or authorized to use.
  • Intentionally or unintentionally violating any applicable national or international law, including but not limited to any regulations having the force of law.
  • Posting attachments (such as pictures or documents) to a forum except where the forum concerned specifically permits such attachments
  • Posting anything other than plain unformatted text emails (ie; HTML, rtf, etc.)

Genuine mistakes will be treated as such – nobody will be excluded from use of the facilities for a single transgression unless it is obvious, in the opinion of the forum owner or MMSA administrators, that it was intentional.

The final decision on what constitutes unacceptable behavior is entirely at the discretion of the Mississippi Main Street Association administrators – there is no automatic right of access to the services provided by the MMSA.

4. Privacy

Forum subscribers will respect the privacy of fellow subscribers at all times.

Subscribers shall not reveal email addresses of other subscribers to a third party without their permission.

The contents of messages should be treated in the same way as a written letter. In other words, exercise normal standards of good behavior if discussing the contents of messages with third parties.

Specifically, the quoting of message content and/or the forwarding of messages posted to forums on the MMSA on other Internet based forums is invariably a breach of Internet etiquette unless the prior permission of the author has been granted.

“Contents of messages” is defined as both the actual wording and the contextual meaning of a message – ie; re-wording a message in order to post it elsewhere is still a breach of this AUP.

Messages sent to any announcement forum on the MMSA forum server may be quoted on discussion forums within the MMSA for the purposes of further discussion about the subject concerned. Before quoting announcements elsewhere it is advisable to contact the originator of the message.

The Mississippi Main Street Association will not reveal forum subscribers email addresses to any third party – the only people who have access to subscribers email addresses and personal information are the list owner(s) and the MMSA administrators.

5. Security
Subscribers to MMSA mailing lists shall not reveal their web interface access password to any third party nor shall they give any third party any other information that may assist them in breaching the security of private mailing lists or the MMSA system.