Acceptable Use Policy

This policy covers every email sent with Ravenpost — through Ravenpost’s own sending (Amazon SES) or through an email provider you connect — and the contact lists, subscribe forms and campaigns behind it. It is part of our Terms of Service, and the Data Processing Addendum covers the personal data in your lists. Breaking it can get a campaign stopped, a sender paused, a list removed or an account closed.

You are the sender of the email you send with Ravenpost: the person or business whose name is on it, who decides who receives it, and who answers for it under the law. Ravenpost sends it on your instruction.

Only email people who asked to hear from you

Everybody on your list must have agreed to hear from you: they subscribed through a form, gave you their address for this kind of email, or — where the law allows it — are your existing customers receiving news about products like the ones they bought, with a clear way to say no from the very first message. You must be able to show how and when each person agreed. Ravenpost records how every contact was added (an upload, a form, by hand) and, for an upload, that you confirmed the people on it agreed to hear from you; for a form, when the person confirmed by clicking the link we emailed them.

These are not allowed, whatever their source promises:

• Lists you bought, rented, traded or were given, and addresses that were scraped, harvested from websites, guessed or “appended” to another list.
• Lead-generation and co-registration lists where the person did not choose to hear from you specifically.
• Addresses you collected for something else — receipts, support, an event, a download — used for marketing they did not agree to.
• Shared and role addresses (info@, sales@, support@, admin@) unless that address subscribed itself. Our uploads leave them out unless you say otherwise.
• Anybody who unsubscribed, bounced or marked your email as spam. Uploading them again does not put them back; somebody who unsubscribed comes back only by subscribing again through one of your forms.
• A list that has not heard from you in a long time — as a rule, more than twelve months — without first asking the people on it whether they still want your email.

What you must not send

• Email that hides who it is from or what it is: a false or misleading sender name, From address, reply address or subject line, or headers altered to disguise where it came from.
• Phishing, attempts to collect passwords, card numbers or other credentials, and email that impersonates another person, brand or organisation.
• Malware, or links and attachments that lead to it.
• Offers of illegal goods or services, counterfeit or stolen goods, weapons sold unlawfully, and prescription medicines or controlled substances sold without the licence the law requires.
• Gambling, betting or lotteries where you are not licensed or where they are unlawful for the recipient.
• Sexually explicit material, except to adults who confirmed their age and asked for it.
• Hate speech, harassment, threats, incitement to violence, and content that exploits or endangers children.
• Unsolicited promotion of investments, cryptocurrencies or tokens, trading signals, loans, debt relief, credit repair, multi-level marketing and get-rich-quick schemes.
• Content that infringes somebody else’s copyright, trademark or other rights, or that publishes another person’s private information.
• Anything else that breaks the law where you send from or where your recipients are.

What every message carries

Ravenpost adds these to every campaign, and you must not remove, hide or work around them:

• Your name as the sender, and an address replies can reach.
• Your postal address, when you give one. It is optional in the product because not every law asks for it, but the United States' CAN-SPAM Act does for marketing email to people there: if you have readers in the US, adding it is your responsibility.
• An unsubscribe link, which opens a page with a single button — no sign-in, no questions — and one-click unsubscribe headers (RFC 8058), which the Unsubscribe buttons Gmail, Yahoo and Apple Mail show beside your name use, and which take effect at once.

A domain sending through Ravenpost’s own sending is verified with DKIM and its own MAIL FROM domain, and needs a DMARC record — Gmail and Yahoo require all three of bulk senders.

The laws that apply to you

You are responsible for following the laws of the places you send from and send to. Among them:

• United States — the CAN-SPAM Act: no deceptive headers or subject lines, your postal address in every message, and opt-outs honoured.
• European Union and United Kingdom — the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive and the national laws that apply it (including PECR in the UK): marketing email needs prior consent, or the narrow exception for your own existing customers.
• Canada — CASL: consent, identification and a working unsubscribe in every message.
• Türkiye — the Law on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (No. 6563) and its Regulation on Commercial Communication and Commercial Electronic Messages, which require prior consent and, for the senders it covers, registering consents in İYS (the Message Management System); and KVKK (No. 6698) for the personal data itself. Ravenpost does not check İYS for you.

The mailbox providers hold bulk senders to rules of their own: an authenticated domain, one-click unsubscribe honoured within two days, and a spam complaint rate kept well below 0.3%.

Keeping a list healthy

Ravenpost does part of this for you:

• An address that bounces permanently is never sent to again from your list — and, on Ravenpost’s own sending, from anybody’s list: one account, one shared list of addresses that do not exist.
• Somebody who unsubscribes or marks your email as spam is never sent another campaign from your list, from the moment we hear it — through our own link, a mailbox provider’s Unsubscribe button or its spam report.
• Ravenpost’s subscribe forms confirm every sign-up by email (double opt-in), and forget anybody who does not confirm within a week.

The rest is yours: send what people signed up for, as often as they expect it, and stop emailing people who no longer open anything — the “inactive for” segment finds them.

What we watch, and what we do

• Review. A person at Ravenpost looks at every new domain on our own sending before its first campaign goes out. We may ask how a list was collected, and we may decline a sender.
• A gradual start. A new sender on our own sending has a daily limit that grows over its first weeks, the way mailbox providers expect a new domain to start.
• Automatic pauses. A sender on our own sending is paused automatically when its bounces or spam complaints pass the industry thresholds shown on your Deliverability page. Amazon SES can also pause a sender on its own. A paused sender sends nothing until we have looked at why.
• Enforcement. When email breaks this policy we may stop a campaign, pause or remove a sender, remove a list, suspend a workspace’s email features or close the account. Where the harm is immediate — to the people receiving it, to other customers’ delivery or under the law — we act first and tell you why straight after. Fees are not refunded for sending stopped under this policy, except where the law requires it. We cooperate with authorities where the law requires us to.

Reporting abuse

If you received email sent with Ravenpost that you did not ask for, unsubscribe with the link at its foot (one button, no sign-in) or your mail app’s own Unsubscribe button. Then tell us at support@ravenpo.st, with the message attached or its headers pasted in. We look into every report.

Changes

We may update this policy as the law and the mailbox providers’ rules change. The date at the top says when it last changed, and what changes applies to email sent from that date.