Email Note - Please Read:
Please note the following:
•
All email from the following sources is now auto-deleted:
Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, Live.com, and Windowslive.com.
•
Any email over 18 KB is auto-deleted. (If you need to send an attachment
please write ahead of time to arrange it.)
Our apologies if these email rules cause inconvenience. These rules were instituted
to curtail excessive spam and virus email sent from anonumous webmail accounts, and also as a measure to
help protect the privacy of all involved.
A Disturbing Issue: Privacy concerns with corporate, web-based email services:
Email is private communication, just as a posted letter is
private. However, if you use free, web-based, corporate-owned email
services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, "Windows Live", etc. you are sacrificing your
privacy and that of your recipients. In many cases you will also subject your
recipients to advertising, making your recipients pay for your "free" email. (For instance, Yahoo email appends crass ads for
Yahoo services to email sent through their service.)
Over time, disturbing patterns have developed with free, corporate-hosted
email. It has become clear that neither the hosting corporations nor
legal authorities regard web-based email as private property in the same way
that postal mail is regarded as private property.
At one point the
Hotmail user agreement was claiming full copyright rights for all material passing
through Hotmail servers! In their current agreement (as of 2-08), Microssoft seems to say that the entire
public has rights to anything you post through their service. So they have turned it around.
Instead of saying, "We share your copyright." they are saying, "You forfeit your copyright."
Microsoft's position altogether is confusing and difficult to pin down. If you go to the Hotmail sign-up page
and click to read the
Service Agreement, it actually takes you to a general Microsoft help search page.
In any case, Hotmail is so dysfunctional as render the privacy and personal property issues
fairly irrelevant. The Hotmail server rejected a JSWare email sent
in response to a Hotmail
email as being suspiciously spam-like! So JSWare cannot accept Hotmail even if we wanted to.
In
a case with GMail,
it was revealed that Google essentially regards GMail content as their own property which
cannot be fully deleted by GMail users.
In other words, companies such as Google and Microsoft
regard your email content itself, and not just the email transport mechanism, as a part of their service, which you
use at their discretion. The trend with these companies is to essentially rifle through your
private communications for the purposes of marketing research and "targetted advertising".
And of course, anyone who sends email to a customer of these "free" webmail services
becomes victim of the same sleazy exploitation and theft of private documents.
The privacy and dignity of communications, whether personal or business, is respected at JSWare
and we expect the same basic courtesy from others. Communications that are not sent from
a proper email address will not be received at JSWare. They are auto-deleted from the mail server.
