GeGroups terms

What this covers

GeGroups runs mailing lists and the groups around them: subscriptions and delivery, a web archive, files, photos, a wiki, a calendar, polls and chat, on domains you control.

These sit alongside the general terms of service.

Licence

GeGroups is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0, plus one additional restriction from us: commercial use requires a business licence.

That addition is stated separately because ELv2 does not contain it. ELv2's own limitations are three — you may not provide the software to others as a hosted or managed service, may not circumvent the licence-key functionality, and may not remove or alter the licensing, copyright or other notices — and it otherwise permits a company to run the software commercially for its own internal purposes. Our additional term removes that permission.

Non-commercial use on your own infrastructure is free of charge. Commercial use of any kind, including internal use inside a business, needs a business licence from us.

What you are running

A mailing list is a publishing system that looks like an inbox. Whoever owns a group decides who may join, who may post, whether the archive is public, and whether members' email addresses appear in it.

Those are consequential settings and the defaults are the cautious ones — a new list is private, joining is restricted, and only members may post — with one exception you should know about:

Email addresses are not masked in the archive by default. mask_email_in_archive starts off. If your archive is public and masking is off, your members' addresses are public. Decide that deliberately.

If we host it for you

You are the controller of your members' data and we are your processor: the data processing agreement and its annex apply.

You are responsible for what your groups publish, for having a lawful basis to email the people on your lists, and for honouring the unsubscribe requests those people make. We deliver what you send; we do not check that you were entitled to send it.

Sending mail

Messages leave our servers and are delivered to wherever each member's address is hosted. That is what sending email is, and it means a message reaches the recipient's provider — which may be anywhere in the world and is not chosen by either of us.

Do not use GeGroups to send unsolicited bulk mail. We authenticate your domains with SPF, DKIM and DMARC so that your mail is deliverable and so that your domain cannot easily be forged; using that reputation to spam is grounds for immediate suspension, and it damages every other user on the same infrastructure.

Bounces are tracked, and an address that hard-bounces repeatedly is stopped. That is not optional and not a setting: continuing to send to a dead address is how a sender's reputation is destroyed.

Custom member fields

You can define your own fields and collect answers from your members. Whatever you collect is yours to justify — we do not see a reason for it, cannot assess whether you need it, and the categories of personal data in your instance stop being ones we can enumerate the moment you add one.

Do not use custom fields to collect special-category data unless you have a basis under Art. 9 for doing so.

Acceptable use

Beyond the general terms: do not use a group archive to expose people, do not use the member list as a mailing list for something else, and do not import addresses you were not given for this purpose.

Availability

No service level is promised unless a separate signed agreement states one. Mail delivery depends on receiving providers, which are outside our control.

No warranty, no service level, and limited liability

This product is provided as it is and as it happens to be available, without warranty of any kind, and is used at your own risk. No uptime, response time or restoration time is owed unless a separate signed agreement states one. Where it is provided free of charge, liability is limited to intent and gross negligence (Section 521 BGB).

To the fullest extent the law permits, we are not liable for damage arising from its use, its unavailability, or any loss of data — and keeping your own backups is your responsibility. The limits that mandatory law requires, the exclusions that apply within them, and the additional cap that applies to business customers are set out in full in the general terms of service, which govern this product and are not restated here.