Acceptable use policy

1. Permission

Email only people who gave you clear permission to email them about what you send. That means:

• They signed up on your form, website or app, or explicitly agreed to get your newsletter.
• No purchased, rented, scraped, harvested, shared or co-registration lists, and no addresses copied from websites, directories or social networks.
• No emailing people who unsubscribed elsewhere, or whose permission is more than a couple of years old without them hearing from you since.
• When you import a list, you confirm every contact on it opted in. We may ask you to show where it came from.

We recommend double opt-in (a confirmation email before someone joins), which is on by default for lowsend signup forms.

2. What every email needs

• An honest sender name and subject line that match the content.
• A valid postal address for you or your business.
• The unsubscribe link lowsend adds. Don't remove, hide or break it, and don't ask people to sign in to unsubscribe.
• Compliance with the laws that apply to you and your readers, such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR, the UK GDPR, CASL and the ePrivacy rules.

3. What you can't send

• Phishing, malware, or links to them; anything that tries to collect passwords, card numbers or other credentials.
• Scams, deceptive offers, "get rich quick", pyramid or multi-level marketing schemes, and fake invoices or notices.
• Illegal goods or services, and content that infringes someone's copyright, trademark or privacy.
• Sexually explicit content, and anything that sexualizes minors.
• Content that incites violence, harassment or hatred against people for who they are.
• Online gambling, payday loans, debt relief, unregulated investments or crypto offerings, and pharmacy or supplement sales that need a license you don't have.
• Affiliate-only mailings to lists that didn't sign up for your own content.
• Emails pretending to be from someone else, including other companies or people.

4. Sending practices we don't allow

• Sending through several accounts to get around limits, pauses or a suspension.
• Hiding who you are, forging headers, or using misleading sender addresses.
• Sending from a domain you don't own or aren't allowed to use.
• Using lowsend for one-to-one transactional email at scale, such as receipts or password resets for another service.
• Probing, overloading or attacking our systems, or abusing the API and its rate limits.

5. Bounces and spam complaints

High bounce and complaint rates are the clearest sign of a list without permission. We watch them on every send:

Contacts you've never emailed go out in a small first batch, and the rest wait a few hours until that batch's rates are known. Addresses that bounce or report spam are never emailed again.

6. Enforcement

If an account breaks this policy, we may pause its sending, remove contacts, take its websites offline, suspend it or close it, without refund. When we can, we'll explain why and give you the chance to fix it. Serious cases, such as phishing or malware, are closed at once.

7. Report abuse

Got an email sent with lowsend that you didn't ask for? Use its unsubscribe link, and forward it to hello@lowsend.com so we can look into the sender.