Mindstar Productions
E-Mail Policy   

• This policy covers how Mindstar Productions ('Mindstar') treats e-mail and spam. 
• SPAM, as defined here will mean: The mass electronic distribution of unsolicited e-mail to individual e-mail accounts, aliases, or mailing lists and archives.

OUR POLICY

Our policy is quite simple: we don't send spam.   More specifically, we do not send emails of any kind to anybody unless it is a direct reply to a question sent to us, or to communicate a specific business issue to one or more specific individuals.  There was a time, early in our existence, when we would periodically send emails to people who provided their email address to us at trade shows and through our website, so that we could notify them about new products, or new features to existing products.  But since that time, the use and abuse of unsolicited email has become quite a nuisance for all of us, and advertising through email, we believe, is absolutely inappropriate.  Consequently, for many years, we have not and will not send emails of any kind to our contact list, nor will we contract others to do so on our behalf.

THINGS WE CAN CONTROL

Although spammers typically have their own unscrupulous ISP's, and their own servers, they do on occasion attempt to hijack a legitimate company's resources to use as a launching platform for their spam.   To combat this, Mindstar employs the latest in firewalls, security controls, user authentication, and other security measures to prevent the abuse of our facilities and services.  As new technology emerges, we phase in those new approaches to control any unauthorized use of our resources.   Some companies go so far as to eliminate email as a method for customers to contact them, however, we will continue to make our support email address known to the public so our customers can contact us with questions.   

THINGS WE CANNOT CONTROL

Unfortunately, protecting our servers and our networks is not enough.  Spammers can, with very little effort, send their annoying spam emails from their own sites, using their own computers, while affixing a "legitimate" email address in the "From" line of the message.  It's possible for someone to receive an email that appears to have come from one of our published support email addresses (as well as other legitimate email addresses from other legitimate companies), and while the email did not originate from our servers, and was not sent by any of our personnel, the recipient only sees a "sender email address" that references our help desk or one of our publicly known addresses.  Usually, spammers acquire these legitimate email addresses the same way you do, by looking at our website for how to contact us.  Then they just "forge" their email to appear as if it came from us.   They didn't hack our server, they didn't compromise any of our resources, they simply packaged their email to appear as if it came from someone other than themselves.  (It's analogous to going to a print shop and printing envelopes with a return address from the IRS or other government entity, then sending out letters as if they came from that entity).  The easiest way to check if you have received a forged email to you is to look at the email "headers".  If you use Microsoft Outlook, click on View > Options to see a particular note's headers.   Other email systems have similar methods to see the header information for a note.   The originating internet IP address should be visible in those headers, and will usually point to the true origin of the note, most often from another country where United States law enforcement has little jurisdiction.

Questions and Suggestions

We are always interested in reducing spam, and protecting our facilities from abuse. If you have questions or suggestions, please complete our feedback form or you can contact us at: 703-404-1100