These terms cover your use of Our Porch, a service operated by Scale Assembly, LLC (“we”, “us”). By creating a community, joining a mailing list, or posting to one, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
1. What Our Porch is
Our Porch hosts a small website, mailing lists, an events calendar and alerts for a neighborhood or community group. Each community is created and run by the people in it. We provide the software and send the mail; we do not run any community and we are not a member of one.
2. Who may use it
You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Our Porch only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.
You are responsible for the email address you sign in with and for anything done through it. Sign-in links are sent to that address, so anybody who can read that mailbox can act as you. Tell us at support@ourporch.org if you believe somebody else has access to it.
3. Communities, and who is responsible for them
A community has administrators. They decide who may join, which lists exist, what is published on the website, what is held for review, and what stays.
Administrators are responsible for the content they allow onto their community. That includes messages they approve, pages and events they publish, and material posted by members they have admitted. If you run a community, you are taking that on. We give you the tools to moderate — holding posts for review, removing them from the archive, and removing people — and it is your judgement that decides how they are used.
Administrators may also add people to a list in bulk. Somebody added that way has not agreed to anything, and it is the administrator's responsibility to have a reason to believe they want the mail. Every message carries a one-click way to leave.
4. Your content is yours
You keep ownership of everything you post. We claim no ownership of it, and nothing in these terms transfers any of it to us. Your messages, photographs, pages and events remain yours, and remain your responsibility.
You are telling us that you have the right to post what you post — that it is yours, or that you have permission to share it.
5. The permission we need in order to run the service
To do the only thing you are asking us to do — deliver your message to a list and keep it in that list's archive — we need your permission to store it, copy it, transmit it by email, and display it on your community's website. You grant us that permission: a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, for that purpose and no other.
It is limited on purpose. We do not use your content to advertise, we do not sell it, we do not license it to anybody else, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models. Automated checks read messages in order to hold suspected abuse for a human — see section 8 — and for nothing else.
The permission ends when you delete the content, the following exceptions: email that has already been delivered cannot be recalled. A message sent to a list is in the mailboxes of everybody on that list, and deleting it from the archive does not reach them.
6. We do not endorse anything posted
Content on Our Porch is the view of whoever wrote it, and not ours. We do not review it before it is published, we do not verify it, and we do not endorse, sponsor or agree with any of it. That applies to messages, pages, events, alerts and links.
The same is true in the other direction: a post being held or removed by an automated check is not a finding about the person who wrote it.
7. What you may not do
You may not use Our Porch to:
- break the law, or help somebody else break it;
- harass, threaten, defame or impersonate anybody, or post content that sexualises a child;
- send bulk unsolicited mail, or add people to a list who do not want it;
- distribute malware, or link to it;
- collect addresses from a community's pages or messages for any purpose other than taking part in that community;
- interfere with the service, evade its limits, or attempt to reach another community's data.
- send encrypted mail to a list — see section 10.
8. Moderation
Lists may hold posts for review before they go out.
We may remove content, suspend a list, or suspend or close a community, if we believe it breaks these terms or exposes us or others to harm. See also Section 12.
9. Copyright complaints
If you believe something on Our Porch infringes your copyright, write to support@ourporch.org with enough detail to identify the work, the material you say infringes it and where it is, your contact details, and a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised and that what you have told us is accurate.
10. Email
Using Our Porch means receiving email. Every list message carries a way to leave the list, in one click, and we will act on it. We also send mail that is not from a list — sign-in links, confirmations, and notices about your community — and you cannot unsubscribe from those while you have an account.
We do not accept encrypted email, and we will not host it. Where we can identify an encrypted message we discard it, without storing it and without delivering it. Users that require encrypted services should seek services that can provide stronger privacy guarantees than OurPorch.
Signed mail is not affected. A signature sits alongside readable text, and we relay it like anything else.
11. Your data, and what is not private
Nothing you put into Our Porch should be treated as private or confidential.
- A list's archive may be public. A public archive is reachable by anybody who knows the address, whether or not it is set to appear in search engines.
- Author addresses can be masked from people who are not signed in, but they are shown in full to members of the community.
- Every administrator of a community can export the entire community's content at any time.
- A message sent to a list has been handed to everybody on that list. What they do with it is not something we control.
- Our staff can enter a community in order to support it or to investigate abuse. That access is recorded.
We store what the service needsi, we do not sell it and we do not share it with advertisers.
You can take it with you. The export contains everything, is always available to an administrator, and nothing is held back from it. Closing a community erases it permanently; we keep a copy of the archive for a short period in case the closure was a mistake and it can be retrieved by email in that time, after which it is gone.
12. Availability, and withdrawal
Our Porch is free. There is no service level and no uptime promise.
We may change, suspend, or withdraw the service, or any community on it, at any time and without notice. We may also apply and adjust limits on how much mail a community can send.
13. No warranty
The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, secure, or free of error, or that any message will be delivered.
14. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or undelivered or misdirected mail. Our total liability arising out of these terms or the service is limited to one hundred US dollars, which reflects that the service is provided free of charge.
Some places do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as that law permits.
15. Indemnity
If a claim is brought against us because of what you posted, what you allowed onto a community you administer, or your breach of these terms, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against it, including reasonable legal costs.
16. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. The version above is the date of the current text. Where a change is material we will make a reasonable effort to tell administrators by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the new terms.
17. Ending it
You may leave a list at any time, and an administrator may close a community at any time. We may end your access as described in sections 8 and 12. Sections 4, 5, 6, 13, 14 and 15 survive the end of these terms.
18. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Indiana, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of Indiana have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.
19. Contact
Write to support@ourporch.org about the service, or for legal and copyright notices.