Acceptable Usage Policy & Anti-Spam Policy

At Smarty Software, we take permission very seriously. By becoming a customer and agreeing to our Terms of Use, you are also agreeing to this anti-spam policy. Your use of Smarty Software’s website and services is also subject to this policy.

If you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by Smarty Software in its sole discretion, we may warn you, or suspend or terminate your account. Please note that, in accordance our Terms of Use, we may change this policy at any time. It is your responsibility to keep up-to-date with and comply with this policy.

Prohibited Content

Please don’t use Smarty Software to send anything offensive, to promote anything illegal, or to harass anyone. You may not send:

• Emails offering to sell illegal goods or services
• Emails that violate CAN-SPAM Laws
• Pornography/sexually explicit content

Some industries have higher-than-average abuse complaints, which can jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. Nothing personal, but in order to maintain the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we can’t allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:

• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Work from home, make money online, and lead generation opportunities
• Gambling services or products
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities
• List brokers or list rental services
• Selling “Likes” or followers for a social media platform

Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny

We’ve also found that certain types of content may cause higher-than-average abuse rates. In general, hard bounce rates should be under 5%, and spam complaint rates should be less than 0.1%. For that reason, we may closely review, suspend, throttle, or disable accounts that exceed these rates and/or offer the following services, products, or content:

• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content
• Daily horoscope reports
• Mortgages and loans
• Nutritional, herbal, and vitamin supplements
• Adult Entertainment/Novelty Items
• Real estate
• Services that support programmatically sending mail on behalf of third parties without creating or reviewing the content

Prohibited Actions

We work hard to maintain the positive reputation of our system, but we count on our customers to pitch in too. You may not:

• Send Spam. Spam can be in the form of bulk emails or one to one commercial emails. For bulk emails we use the definition by Spamhaus, in short “unsolicited bulk email.” For single commercial emails, we define spam as any message that violates CAN SPAM law.
• You must be able to point to an opt-in form or show other evidence of consent for bulk email.
• Put into your Email or Account any material that wasn’t created by you, provided for you to use, or that would violate anyone’s rights. That includes text, photos, graphics, and other content.
• Use any misleading or incorrect names, addresses, email addresses, subject lines, or other information on the Website or in any Emails created or sent using our Service.
• Decipher, decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer any of the software on our Website, or in any way used or downloaded from the Website.
• Use an outside unsubscribe process when sending bulk content to a list hosted in Smarty Software.
• Import or incorporate any of this information into any lists, emails or uploads to our servers: Social Security numbers, passwords, security credentials, or sensitive personal information.
• Upload or send to purchased, rented, third-party, co-reg, publicly available data, or partner lists of any kind.
• Send or forward personal mail. Send content created in Smarty Software through another service.
• Host images on our servers for any purpose other than for use in your email campaigns.
• Host content on our servers for any purpose other than to send email campaigns.
• Delete, bulk unsubscribe, or otherwise modify your list in order to avoid our billing thresholds.
• Send bulk emails, meaning emails directed to a number of individuals with the same content, through Mandrill.
• Mandrill is designed for transactional email. Please use Smarty Software for your bulk sending needs.

Anti-Spam Policy

What’s the Law?

The legal environment changes all the time, however Smarty Software abides by the UK’s interpretation and implementation of the EU privacy and spam regulations, whereby we only send marketing emails to individuals where they have agreed to receive them, except where there is a clearly defined customer relationship. In most other cases (i.e. B2C, Sole Traders and LLPs) all email recipients must have opted-in to, or otherwise validly consented to, receiving communications from you, the sender.

Email addresses which are OK to send to with Smarty Software.

There are a number of ways in which you can capture and acquire data for sending emails through Smarty Software. This could be done through:

• A web form like an email newsletter sign-up on your web site.
• An offline form like a survey, competition or at an event.
• If someone gives you their business card

In line with the UK’s interpretation and implementation of the EU privacy and spam regulations you must provide the recipient with an opt-out facility. We do not require the contact you are emailing to have opted-in to your communications.

However where B2C email addresses (like Hotmail, Gmail, etc), Sole Traders and LLPs are concerned you will have explicitly asked for permission to add them to your list and you can prove they have opted-in to receiving your communications.

So, for instance if someone has put their business card in a bowl at a consumer trade show, there must be a sign indicating they will be contacted by email about that specific topic. Digitally you will provide people tick boxes to opt-in to you communications.

What content you MUST include in your email?
With every email commercial/marketing email you send through Smarty Software there must be:

• A link to opt-out that allows the recipient to remove themselves from your list or update their preferences.
• The name, company registration number and physical address of the sender.

We keep an eye on you and keep you in the ‘good books’.

Smarty Software monitors your instance to ensure you comply with our anti-spam policy. Here’s the two main ways:

• Our software is directly integrated into the spam reporting systems for some of the biggest ISP’s. If you don’t have permission and someone marks your campaign as spam, we’ll know about it the moment that button is pressed. We monitor complaint rates and as such high levels of complaints will result in accounts being locked or terminated.
• We monitor blacklists and our abuse accounts all day every day. We can pinpoint who is causing us delivery problems or attracting complaints very easily.
  If we do discover that you’re emailing people without their permission or getting spam reports from ISPs, we will inform you and in some cases we will suspend your account with immediately.

If you have any questions about our Anti-Spam Policy, or if you want to report spamming activity by one of our customers, please contact us at:hello@smartysoftware.net 

Some additional resources:

Guide to Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations

The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2016

Direct Marketing Associations Guidelines

The UK Advertising Codes lay down rules for advertisers, agencies and media owners to follow.

European Union