Definition of spam

We have adopted the Spamhaus’ project definition of Spam. Spam as applied to email means ‘Unsolicited Bulk Email’.

• Unsolicited means that the recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.
• Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

You may use phpList Hosted (beta) and other phpList Hosted services only to send emails to contacts who have given you written (including electronic) permission to send them emails.
This means:

• Only permission-based lists.
• No purchased, rented or borrowed lists.

In the following text, where ‘phpList Hosted’ is mentioned, it includes the beta version, phpList Hosted (beta).

Permission-based list

How to obtain people’s permission:

• Use a double opt-in subscribe procedure. After people have completed the subscribe form on your website, you must send a confirmation email which offers a link for subscribers to confirm their subscription. PhpList Hosted can be configured to do this automatically.
• When you import a list of contacts, for example a list of email addresses you have collected at an event, you should send a first notification message where people confirm that they want to be added to your list. *
• Always keep the unsubscribe link on your campaigns , so people have the opportunity to change their opinion and easily opt out of your email communications. PhpList Hosted will remove unsubscribe requests automatically and promptly.
• When you ask people for their email address (on the subscribe form online, or when asking for their business card), be clear what you will use it for. Tell the subscriber what to expect: how often you send emails, how large they are, what style, what topics and content, etc. Don’t hide information about the subscription on remote pages, behind hyperlinks, or buried in jargon, legalese, and obfuscation.
• Your campaign subject line should be straightforward and not misleading. Its purpose is to indicate the content of your message. Keep it short, don’t use capital letters, exclamation marks and typical spam words such as ‘Free’ or ‘Special offer’.
• Make sure you mail the list at regular intervals. Unmailed lists provoke high complaint rates when they are reactivated, even from truly opt-in addresses.
• Note that people may abandon their email address or change their preferences. phpList Hosted is set to remove email addresses from your list automatically after the first bounce.
• Make sure you state your physical address and contact details on every communication, so people know who you are and what you do.

* It remains possible to immediately confirm imported contacts, but when you do this and we receive a spam notification by one of the ISPs, we will suspend your account immediately.

Prohibited Content and Industries

You may not use phpList Hosted or any other phpList Hosted service to promote anything illegal or to harass somebody.

You may not use phpList Hosted to send email campaigns that link to or display nudity, obscene content, gambling related content, pharmaceutical related content, illegal software, viruses, or to distribute any other content that we deem inappropriate.

Bandwidth issues

You may not use our bandwidth for anything other than your phpList Hosted campaigns. This means that you can only store images and templates you are using for your PhpList Hosted communications. It is not allowed to use our servers as extra storage space.

phpList Hosted allows you to send a webpage, i.e. designing your newsletter on a page of your website and sending it to your contacts. It is allowed to send pages from your own website only. When doing this, make sure your server can handle the increased request of html and images after sending out a campaign.

We limit the number of messages that can be sent from your account using batch processing. When your account show compliance to our terms and conditions, the batch size will be increased.

We have limited the number of messages that are sent out to the same domain to three emails per minute, automatically queueing the rest for the following minutes.

Human Review & Approval

To protect the reputation of phpList Hosted and that of our clients, we screen email campaigns for indicators of potential problems such as large import, high campaign volumes, suspicious content in the subject or content of the campaign, bounce reports and number of unsubscribe requests.

We specifically do this with new phpList Hosted account holders. Before sending out your first campaign, you will request activation of your account by using the form in the My Account page on our website. Our moderators will review your account, user list and draft message to reduce the risks of being marked as spam.

Once your account is approved, you can start sending messages. The import facility will then be blocked until we are confident you will continue to use phpList Hosted for legitimate business.

Feedback Loops with ISPs

When a recipient clicks the “this is spam” button in his email application, a FeedbackLoop (FBL) report is sent to us. We remove the complainer from the sender’s list, and track other complaints about that campaign. If the number of complaints per campaign exceeds a certain threshold based on list size, we take appropriate action (which can lead to closing down your account).

Reporting Abuse

If you know of or suspect any phpList Hosted users of violating this anti-spam policy, please let us know. phpList Hosted users can be identified by the URL ending with .hosted.phplist.com. Any other URL will be the Download version of phpList in which case we have no control over the system and the contents. In those situations, you can review our page on spam and how to deal with it.