Sending Policy
What you may send through Sendwax, the permission we expect you to have, and the limits we enforce automatically.
Why this exists. Every account on Sendwax sends through shared infrastructure. A single sender mailing a purchased list does not just hurt themselves — it moves the reputation that decides whether everyone else's receipts and password resets reach the inbox. This policy is the line, and section 4 describes the limits we enforce in code rather than by asking nicely.
1. Permission
You may only send to people who gave you permission to email them, and you must be able to show where and when they gave it.
Permission means
- They entered their address on your site, in your product, or on paper, knowing they would hear from you.
- They bought from you, signed up, or opened an account — for mail about that relationship.
- They asked you to contact them.
Permission does not mean
- A list you bought, rented, swapped, scraped, or had appended.
- Addresses guessed or generated from a pattern (
info@,sales@, first.last@). - An address collected for one purpose and used for another — a checkout is not a newsletter opt-in.
- Someone who unsubscribed, however long ago.
- A conference badge scan, unless they were told they were joining your list.
Consent goes stale. If an address has not heard from you in two years, treat it as cold and re-confirm before mailing it in bulk.
Business prospecting
There is one exception, and it is narrow on purpose. You may email a business about its own business — your services, offered to a company that plausibly needs them — without it having opted in first, provided every condition below holds. This is the only unsolicited mail Sendwax permits.
- A business address, not a person's. The published contact address of a company. Never a consumer mailbox, and never an individual's address obtained from anywhere other than that company's own published contact details.
- Conspicuously published by that business. You read the address off their own website, storefront or public listing. If it was published alongside a note saying they do not want offers, that note governs.
- Found, not guessed. The prohibition above still stands, and this is
the line between them: reading
info@off a company's contact page is permitted, applyinginfo@to a list of domains is not. If you cannot name the page you found it on, you guessed it. - Recorded. Keep where each address came from and when you collected it. If we ask and you cannot show it, the exception does not cover that address.
- Relevant to them. The mail must concern the recipient's business or role. The same advertisement sent to every address you could find is not prospecting; it is a purchased list you assembled yourself.
- Your own services. First party only — not on behalf of a client, not for a partner, and never a list you go on to sell, share or append.
- On its own sending domain. Prospecting leaves from a domain you use for nothing else, separate from your transactional and opt-in mail, so that what it earns stays with it.
- An initial message and at most one follow-up. If they do not reply, that is an answer. Identification, a real postal address and a working one-click unsubscribe are required exactly as in section 3.
The complaint ceiling for prospecting is tighter than anything else in this policy: 0.1%, one per thousand. Cross it and we withdraw the exception from your account. That is a decision we make, separately from and sooner than the automatic pauses in section 4, and we make it on the first breach — because prospecting that is going badly is paid for by every other account on the shared pool rather than by you.
Outside the United States this exception may not be yours to take. Canada requires the address to be conspicuously published and the message to relate to the recipient's role. The EU and the UK are narrower still, and nothing here replaces your own assessment before you mail into them. Where local law is stricter than this policy, local law governs.
2. What you may not send
- Unsolicited bulk email, with the single exception of the business prospecting described in section 1.
- Deceptive mail — forged headers, a misleading From identity, or a subject line that misrepresents the content.
- Phishing and credential harvesting, or anything impersonating another person or company.
- Malware, or links leading to it.
- Content that is unlawful where it is received, or that infringes someone's rights.
- Mail on behalf of a third party that hides who is actually sending.
- Anything routed through Sendwax to evade a suspension elsewhere.
We also do not accept the categories that generate complaints faster than any list hygiene can absorb: pharmaceuticals, "work from home" and get-rich-quick offers, adult content, gambling where it is not licensed, cryptocurrency promotion, debt relief, and lead-generation lists sold on to third parties.
3. What every account must do
| Authenticate | Verify your sending domain (SPF and DKIM) before sending from it. We will not send from an unverified domain. |
| Register senders | A From address must be added and approved. Owning a domain is not authority to send as every mailbox on it. |
| Honor unsubscribes | Marketing mail carries a working unsubscribe, including one-click. Suppressions are enforced at send time by us — do not route around them. |
| Physical address | Marketing mail must carry a real postal address. Set it under Account → Workspace. A mailbox service is fine. |
| Keep lists clean | Remove hard bounces and complainers. We suppress them automatically; re-adding them is a breach of this policy. |
| Warm up | A new domain sending a large volume on day one will be filtered. Build up over a couple of weeks. |
Transactional mail — receipts, password resets, alerts someone asked for — does not need an unsubscribe link and is not stopped by a marketing opt-out. It is still subject to everything else here.
4. The limits we enforce
These are not guidelines. They are thresholds in the code, evaluated on a rolling 24-hour window, and crossing one pauses sending on the account automatically.
| Measure | Sending pauses at | Applies once |
|---|---|---|
| Hard bounce rate | 3% of messages sent | 500 messages sent in the window |
| Complaints | 2 complaints | 500 messages sent in the window |
| API requests | 300 per minute, per API key | always |
| Monthly volume | your plan's allowance | always |
| Platform-wide hard bounce rate | 2% of messages sent | 2,000 messages across Sendwax |
| Platform-wide complaint rate | 0.08% of messages sent | 2,000 messages across Sendwax |
The bounce and complaint thresholds sit deliberately below the ones our upstream provider reviews accounts at, so a problem is stopped while it is still ours to fix rather than after it has become everyone's. The minimum volumes exist so that two bounces on a ten-message test do not trip anything.
The last two measure Sendwax as a whole, because our upstream provider judges us as a whole. If the platform crosses one of them we pause the accounts contributing most to it, which can include an account that is inside its own limits. We would rather tell you that plainly than have it arrive as a surprise: it is the clearest reason this policy is strict about lists, and the reason section 1 keeps prospecting on a tighter ceiling than anything else.
5. What happens when a line is crossed
In most cases the breaker pauses your sending before a person looks at it. When that happens you will see the reason in your dashboard, queued mail is held rather than dropped, and the API returns a clear error instead of silently accepting messages.
- Automatic pause. Clean up the list or fix the source of the bounces, then contact us to lift it.
- Rate reduction. We may lower your limits while a problem is investigated.
- Suspension. For deliberate abuse, or a pause you keep working around.
- Termination. For the conduct in section 2, without notice where mail is actively causing harm.
We would rather help you fix a list than close your account. Tell us early; a bounce problem explained in advance is a conversation, the same problem discovered by our provider is not.
6. Reporting a sender
If you received mail sent through Sendwax that breaks this policy, send it to abuse@sendwax.com with the full message headers — the headers are what let us identify the account. We investigate every report.
To stop hearing from a particular sender, use the unsubscribe link in their message; that takes effect immediately and we enforce it at send time.
7. Changes
We will update this policy as sending norms and our own provider's rules change, and revise the effective date above. Material changes are announced by email before they take effect. This policy forms part of the Terms of Service; where they cover the same ground, the Terms govern.
8. Contact
Questions about whether something is allowed — ask us before you send it: support@sendwax.com, or via the contact page.
Sendwax · State of Florida, United States