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by JoshTriplett 3114 days ago
> - Fastmail can immediately cancel your account for any reason: "The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments."

Other than the last clause about "without providing any refund", I would expect this from any service provider, and I'd certainly never want to run a service that didn't have this in its terms.

I do agree that the disclosure terms are more permissive than they should be.

3 comments

>Other than the last clause about "without providing any refund", I would expect this from any service provider

that's certainly not the case for office365, for example. https://www.microsoft.com/online/mosa/MOSA2014Agr(NA)(ENG)(N... . same with gsuite. https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_in/terms/2013/1/premier_te...

>and I'd certainly never want to run a service that didn't have this in its terms.

that may make sense if it was for a free trial, or it was for a cat sharing app, but I certainly would not want my business to be dependent on a service that can be yanked away from me at any time.

>> - Fastmail can immediately cancel your account for any reason: "The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments."

> Other than the last clause about "without providing any refund", I would expect this from any service provider, and I'd certainly never want to run a service that didn't have this in its terms.

You expect from any service that they can cancel your account for any reason ?!? We must not have the same set of requirements. Anyway the point is not relevant anymore as they have changed the TOS (it's much better now).

> You expect from any service that they can cancel your account for any reason

Yes, absolutely. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." I expect to be able to do that for any service I run, and I expect others to be able to do the same.

I also expect that doing so lightly, without a very well-justified reason, would get reported on and lead to a massive backlash. So, in practice, I expect such a clause to be used as, effectively, 'if you try to find a "creative" way to weasel your way out of our specific terms like "don't be disruptive, don't spam, etc", such that your activity meets the letter of the ToS but not the spirit, we'll kick you off anyway". Personally, if I were writing a ToS, I'd write the relevant term along those lines instead.

In almost all cases, we're very happy to provide refunds - particularly early in a subscription period. We also automatically refund if we believe accounts were opened with stolen credit details (happens more often than we would like despite all the checks in place at payment time).
Please also consider to reduce your disclosure rights. As it is currently written in the TOS, it's too broad.