Anti-Spam Policy

Why mail needs a page to itself

Reputation for sending attaches itself to an IP range, not to an account. A single sender working through an acquired list can push every site sharing that range into junk folders for weeks at a stretch, and none of the people affected can hurry the recovery along. On a reseller plan, the first casualties tend to be your own other customers.

Hence a response quicker than anything else in these documents, and hence the advice that resellers should carry the same rules straight into their own terms as well.

1. The consent standard

Consent is required before marketing mail reaches an individual, under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and under data protection law. Consent means a positive act by that person. A pre-ticked box does not qualify. Nor does an address handed over to enter a draw, nor one lifted from a published listing.

A single narrow exception covers existing purchasers, written to about similar products, provided they were offered a refusal at the point the address was taken and again in every message since. That exception is narrower than most senders assume it to be.

For each address you should be able to demonstrate when consent was given, and by what means. Lacking that record, the list may not be used here.

2. Lists that you never gathered

Lists that were bought or rented are refused outright. The same goes for harvested addresses, and for any list inherited with an acquired business, unless the original consent stretches to cover your use of it. Re-permissioning a doubtful list by mailing it fixes nothing, because that very message is the breach.

3. Every message carries

• a sender identity that is accurate, with headers unforged;
• a subject line that describes the content;
• an unsubscribe that works, acted upon on receipt and within three working days at the outside;
• a postal address, plus the registered company standing behind the trading name.

An unsubscribe is permanent. Putting somebody back because a different form was completed, or because a new list was begun, counts as a fresh breach.

4. Ceilings applying to shared and reseller plans

Hourly limits apply, and they are sized for transactional traffic: receipts, password resets, form notifications. Campaigns are not what they are for. Bulk sending belongs with a provider whose actual product is deliverability. Push a list through shared hosting and your own open rates suffer well before the matter becomes anybody else's.

5. Relaying and downstream senders

Open relays are not permitted. Neither is sending on behalf of third parties whose consent practices you cannot evidence. Where you provision mailboxes for customers, what they send is your responsibility as far as we are concerned, since your account is the unit we are able to act upon.

6. When a run starts

What we watch in outbound traffic is the pattern, not the content. Sending halts first; the discussion comes afterwards. An hour spent deliberating over it is the difference between a single warning and a range-wide delisting exercise.

• Compromise. Usually a hijacked form, or a password that got out somewhere. Outbound mail halts, we tell you its origin, and it restarts once the hole is shut.
• Deliberate. The account is terminated, with no refund for the unexpired term.

Should an account bring about a blocklisting, the delisting work, plus the cost of shifting other customers onto clean addresses, may be charged against it.

7. Reporting spam

Through report abuse, with full headers. Traceability comes from the headers. A forwarded body on its own rarely gets anybody anywhere.

8. Mail we send

Messages about service, billing and security arrive regardless, since they form part of running the account. Promotional mail is opt-in, and unsubscribing from it never touches the operational mail. See the privacy policy.

9. Contracting entity

Hosting Seller is a trading name of IGI Security Services Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15881180. Registered office: 60 Tottenham Court Road, Suite 4944a, Fitzrovia, London, United Kingdom, W1T 2EW. Questions to info@hosting-seller.com.