Acceptable Use Policy

This policy sets out what you may and may not do with OwnSender. It applies to everyone using the service and forms part of the Terms of Service.

It exists for a practical reason as much as a legal one. OwnSender sends through your own connected mailbox, not a shared OwnSender address — so misuse damages your domain, your sending reputation and your relationship with your email provider before it affects anyone else. The rules below are the ones that keep a sending account healthy.

OwnSender is built for personalized business communication to people who expect to hear from you. Typical legitimate use includes:

• Transactional and operational messages — invoices, statements, confirmations, account notices.
• Documents issued to named individuals — certificates, passes, reports, letters.
• Event communication to invitees, registrants and attendees.
• Customer communication to your own customers and members.
• Marketing and outreach to recipients who agreed to receive it.

The common thread is a genuine prior relationship or a clear agreement to be contacted. If you cannot explain why a particular recipient is on your list, that is the signal to stop.

You may not use OwnSender to send, or to generate documents containing:

• Content that is unlawful where you or your recipients are.
• Content that harasses, threatens, defames or incites violence against a person or group.
• Sexually explicit material, and any material involving the sexual exploitation of children.
• Content promoting self-harm, or the sale of weapons or controlled substances where doing so is unlawful.
• Deliberate disinformation designed to mislead recipients about a material fact.

Every recipient in your dataset must have agreed to hear from you, or have a relationship with you that reasonably explains the message.

You may not:

• Send to purchased, rented, scraped or otherwise harvested address lists.
• Send to addresses collected for one purpose and used for an unrelated one.
• Ignore an unsubscribe, opt-out or objection request from a recipient.
• Continue mailing an address that has repeatedly failed or complained.
• Split a single campaign across multiple accounts to work around limits.

You are responsible for including whatever identification and opt-out mechanism the law applicable to you and your recipients requires. What that law requires depends on where you and they are located, and it may demand more than this policy does — this policy sets a floor, not a ceiling.

You may only send from a mailbox you are entitled to use, and only on behalf of a party that has authorised you to do so.

Specifically, you may not:

• Connect a sending account you do not own or have permission to send from.
• Send on behalf of another organisation without its authorisation.
• Use a sender name, reply-to address or domain that misrepresents who is writing.
• Forge headers or otherwise disguise the true origin of a message.

Connecting a mailbox authorises OwnSender to send through it. Doing so for an account that is not yours is both a breach of this policy and, in most cases, of your email provider's terms.

OwnSender generates individual documents as well as email text, and that deserves its own rule: a personalized invoice, certificate, statement or receipt is exactly the kind of artefact fraud relies on.

You may not use OwnSender to:

• Send phishing messages, or any message designed to obtain passwords, payment details or other credentials by deception.
• Impersonate a person, company, bank, government body or institution.
• Generate forged or falsified documents — invoices for goods not supplied, certificates not earned, statements of accounts that do not exist, or receipts for payments not made.
• Operate advance-fee fraud, fake prize or lottery schemes, or investment scams.
• Misrepresent the terms of an offer, or the identity of who is making it.

You may not use OwnSender to distribute:

• Viruses, ransomware, spyware, keyloggers or any malicious code.
• Attachments or links intended to compromise a recipient's device or account.
• Links to sites hosting malware or credential-harvesting pages.

The service restricts which file types may be uploaded as attachments, and deliberately excludes executable formats. That control reduces risk; it does not remove your responsibility for what you send, and you must not attempt to work around it.

The recipient data you upload is about real people, and you are the party accountable for it.

You may not:

• Upload personal data you have no lawful basis to hold or to email.
• Disclose someone's personal information to recipients who have no right to see it — including by mis-mapping a variable so one recipient's details appear in another's message or document.
• Send special-category information — health, financial, biometric or similar — without the safeguards your law requires.
• Use recipient data for a purpose those recipients would not expect.

Previewing a campaign against real rows before sending is the practical safeguard against the mis-mapping case, and we recommend it for any send containing sensitive fields.

How OwnSender handles data is set out in the Privacy Policy.

You must hold the rights to everything you upload and send. That includes:

• Fonts, and the licence covering the use you are putting them to — embedding a font in a generated document is not always covered by a desktop licence.
• Images, illustrations, logos and brand assets.
• Text you did not write yourself.

You may not:

• Use another organisation's trade marks or branding in a way that suggests an association that does not exist.
• Distribute material that infringes someone's copyright.
• Use OwnSender's own name or branding to imply an endorsement or partnership.

You may not:

• Create multiple accounts to evade plan limits, quotas or an enforcement action.
• Share account credentials or API keys with people who should not have them.
• Attempt to bypass quota enforcement, access controls or the boundaries between workspaces.
• Probe, scan or test the service's security without our written permission.
• Place unreasonable load on the service, or interfere with other customers' use of it.
• Resell or sublicense the service, or present it as your own product, without our agreement.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, report it through the contact form before disclosing it publicly. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine issue in good faith and does not exploit it.

Where we believe this policy has been breached, our response depends on what happened and how serious it is. We may:

• Contact you to ask about the activity.
• Require you to stop a campaign or remove content.
• Suspend sending while we look into it.
• Suspend or terminate the account.
• Report activity to law enforcement where we are required to, or where there is a risk of serious harm.

For serious breaches — phishing, malware, exploitation material — we may act immediately and without notice, because the harm accrues while we are asking questions.

Enforcement action taken because of a breach does not entitle you to a refund. See the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

Separately, your email provider enforces its own rules on your account and may throttle, suspend or block it regardless of anything we do or do not do.

If you have received a message you believe was sent through OwnSender in breach of this policy, tell us through the contact form or at [abuse contact email].

It helps a great deal if you can include:

• The full message headers, which identify the sending account. Most mail clients expose these as “show original” or “view source”.
• The sender address and the date received.
• What about the message you believe breaches this policy.

Because campaigns are sent from the customer's own mailbox, the headers are what let us identify which account was responsible. A report without them is much harder to act on.

We treat reports confidentially and do not pass your details to the sender.

We may update this policy as the product changes or as new kinds of abuse appear. The date at the top of this page shows the last revision.

Material changes are notified to account holders. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept it.