The four rules

The rules

No marketing

Verification codes, receipts, password resets, alerts, replies, and the correspondence an agent carries out on behalf of its owner with people who wrote first or hold an account. The default, and it covers nearly everyone.

Proof: the recipient began the exchange or has an account with you. We may ask to see how.

Limited marketing

A small number of announcements a year to people who already know you. No more than one message to any one person in a week.

Proof: the list, uploaded, with the relationship to each address stated.

Opt-in only

Newsletters and updates to people who asked twice: a sign-up and a confirmation, before the first message goes out.

Proof: both steps recorded for each address, with when and from where, before anything is sent to it.

Your own customers

Account, billing and service notices to people who already pay you. No prospecting under this rule.

Proof: evidence of the paying relationship.

There is no rule for cold mail, none for bulk mail, and none for a list that was bought. None can be requested, at any price, for any volume, however well the message is written or however warm the introduction is said to be.

What is not allowed

• Unsolicited mail of any kind: cold outreach, "checking in" sequences, introductions to people who did not ask.
• Mail to lists that were bought, rented, scraped, borrowed, or guessed from names and domains.
• Pretending to be someone: spoofing, impersonation, or a sender name or reply address you have no right to use. The sender address is always the inbox's own.
• Malware, credential theft, links to either, or content that hides where it leads behind shorteners and redirect chains.
• Content that is illegal where you are or where the recipient is: fraud, harassment, threats, and anything that exploits children.
• The categories that draw complaints no matter who consented: adult content, pharmaceuticals, gambling, multi-level marketing, payday lending, cryptocurrency promotion, list brokering and lead generation.
• Anything that gets around a limit, a hold or a suppression list, including spreading one stream of mail across several accounts.

An agent is held to every line above. "The agent decided to" is no defense. The holder of the key answers for what was sent with it.

Limits

The numbers are set when the account is opened and shown to you. They work like this.

• Each inbox may send so many messages a day, and each domain a larger number. Over the line, the send is answered with a wait time. It is never dropped without a word.
• A burst limit per inbox per minute, so a loop cannot spend a day's allowance in a moment.
• A limit on new recipients, per inbox per hour and per account per day. A new recipient is an address the account has never written to, never heard from, and never recorded consent for.
• A bounce hold. If hard bounces reach a tenth of what an account sent in the last hour, sending is held on the spot, and the message that met the line waits with it.
• Content scoring. Every outgoing message is scored before it leaves. A high score holds the message for a person to look at; a higher one refuses it. If the scorer is down, mail goes out unscored rather than late.
• Limits are raised when you ask and we agree. Nothing a key can do raises its own.

What happens when a rule is broken

Complaints, bounces and blocklist listings are counted against the account that caused them. The first time an account crosses a line, it is warned. The warning says what we saw, what must change, and by when; the account's limits are halved while it stands.

The second time, the account is closed. We say why, in writing. The account's mail and records stay available to it for thirty days so that nothing is lost. Nothing here happens in the dark: every step comes with its reason.