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Mailing List Terms of Use
Electronic mailing lists are provided for university departments, groups, or organizations to use for discussion, disseminating information (internally or externally), or to act as a contact address. This document explains the terms of agreement for email list owners and subscribers.
Like all Rice information technology services, email lists must follow the Acceptable Use of Information Technology (Rice Policy 832).
Email list owners and subscribers should also keep in mind the following specific points:
- All email lists must be owned or co-owned by a current faculty, student, or staff of Rice University using their @rice.edu address. Any list that fails to have an identifiable current faculty, student, or staff as an owner may be locked or closed without notice.
- In order to ensure that email lists are closed when they are no longer needed, list owners may be asked to re-certify their lists. If a list is not re-certified, it may be closed without further notice.
- Spam mailings and/or commercial use of an email list are potential grounds for removal from any and all email lists provided by the Office of Information Technology (OIT).
- Members of an email list are responsible for the content of any message they send to that list, and list owners are responsible for moderating (changing to reviewing contents of list posting) lists for inappropriate messages and for determining whether a list's archives are publicly accessible.
- List owners are also responsible for the proper management of their lists, and may have their list ownership revoked if they do not manage their lists appropriately.
- Responsibilities of list owners include (but are not limited to):
- Responding to and assisting with subscription and unsubscription requests
- Ensuring that their list has appropriate configurations for the purpose of that list, including whether or not it is moderated, advertised, etc.
- Making subscribers aware if the list is advertised and/or if the archives are accessible to the Internet at large
- Maintaining the list of subscribers and removing addresses that are no longer functional or belong to people who should no longer be on the list
- Responding promptly to errors related to their list (e.g. delivery and remove errors)
- Taking ownership of off-topic list postings, abusive behavior, and/or abuse of the email list service by their subscribers
- Ensuring that usage of their list does not violate the Acceptable Use Policy
- Transitioning list ownership to another individual if and when appropriate
- Departments or central administration may require university faculty, students, or staff to subscribe to certain email lists for the purpose of university business. In all other cases, however, email lists are to be "opt-in".
- Email lists may be locked or closed, have their names or other configurations modified, etc. by OIT staff without the consent of a particular list owner if resource usage, verifiable complaints, and/or university business needs require it.
- Email lists that are closed due to owner request, lack of an eligible owner, violation of Terms of Use will be removed from the system. This includes all archives, subscriber lists, and settings.
- OIT Services cannot recover the settings of any list greater than 30 days after deletion.
- OIT Services cannot recover any subscriber list or archives greater than 30 days after deletion.
- Exceptions to these terms require approval from OIT leadership.