Acceptable use policy

Messages from all Spore customers are delivered by a shared set of sending servers, under common IP addresses and infrastructure domains. Those servers' reputation with mailbox providers is therefore a shared resource.

Concretely: a single customer sending unsolicited mail degrades delivery for every other customer, including those who follow the rules scrupulously. Mass complaints or a blocklist entry can affect the whole service's deliverability for weeks, and cannot be reversed on request.

The prohibitions and measures below exist solely to protect that shared resource, recipients, and the legal compliance of the service. Measures taken are proportionate to the harm observed or imminent.

Spore is a transactional email service. A transactional message is triggered by an action of the recipient or by an existing contractual relationship with them: account confirmation, password reset, receipt, invoice, order notification, security alert, service message.

The service is neither designed nor offered for mass marketing campaigns, promotional newsletters, cold outreach or any bulk sending to an audience that is not expecting it. Such uses are out of scope and breach this policy, even where the recipients appear in an otherwise lawful database.

This scope follows from a design decision: Spore measures neither opens nor clicks and provides no campaign tooling. Marketing use is both unsuited to it and harmful to the shared sending reputation.

It is prohibited to use Spore, directly or indirectly, for:

• Spam — sending unsolicited messages, in bulk or otherwise, to recipients who have not asked for them and with whom you have no relationship justifying the contact.
• Using purchased, rented, exchanged, harvested or scraped lists, whatever their source, including lists presented as “opt-in” by a third party.
• Phishing and any attempt to fraudulently obtain credentials, banking details or personal data.
• Impersonation and forged origin — sending on behalf of a person, brand, public body or domain you do not control; forging a header, sender address or reply-to address.
• Distributing malware — viruses, ransomware, attachments or links leading to malicious code, a fraudulent collection page or a compromised resource.
• Distributing unlawful content — infringing content, content inciting hatred, violence or terrorism, child sexual abuse material, defamatory content, or content whose distribution is prohibited by applicable law.
• Harassment — repeated sending to a recipient who has expressed refusal, threats, intimidation.
• Fraud — scams, fake invoices, fake offers, pyramid schemes, market manipulation.
• Circumventing the service's mechanisms — unauthorised load testing, attempts to access other customers' data, exploiting vulnerabilities, bypassing quotas or rate limits.

Some activities have a sending profile that is structurally incompatible with a shared transactional sending reputation: volume addressed to poorly qualified audiences, persistently high complaint rates, closer scrutiny from mailbox providers. The exclusions below are a commercial scoping decision. They imply nothing as to the lawfulness of those activities, several of which are entirely legal and regulated.

The exclusion targets the activity the messages serve, not the customer's legal form or declared sector. A pharmacy sending its own staff a password reset is not the target; the same pharmacy emailing prospects about its products is.

3.1. Sectors excluded from the service. The service is not offered for sending related to the following activities:

• pharmacy, medicines, food supplements and “miracle” treatments sold or promoted by email;
• gambling, betting, online casinos, and solicitation relating to speculative investments and cryptocurrencies;
• multi-level marketing, pyramid and matrix schemes, get-rich-quick offers;
• aggressive consumer-credit and debt-consolidation offers, of the payday-loan kind;
• adult content, escorting and dating solicitation;
• sale of engagement, followers or reviews, and more generally any social-media manipulation service;
• sale, rental or brokerage of contact lists.

We may refuse to open an account intended for any of these uses, or terminate an account that turns out to be dedicated to one, under the terms of service. That decision is a matter of freedom of contract and carries no assessment of the lawfulness of your activity.

3.2. Sectors requiring prior agreement. The following activities are legitimate but sensitive from a sending-reputation standpoint, and require a prior discussion before any significant volume:

• regulated financial services and insurance;
• health and wellness;
• political and electoral communication;
• fundraising and charitable solicitation.

In those areas we may ask you to evidence how you collect consent and where your addresses come from before allowing volume to increase, under article 4.

You must have, for each recipient you send a message to, a legitimate basis for contacting them: performance of a contract or of a request from the person, a legal obligation, or freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent where consent is required.

You must be able to evidence it on our first request, in particular following a report: origin of the address, date and manner of collection, content of the information given to the person.

A recipient's failure to object does not amount to consent. A generic or publicly available address is likewise not an authorisation to contact.

Spore automatically maintains a suppression list per account: any address producing a hard bounce, a spam complaint or an unsubscribe request is added to it. Sends to those addresses are blocked.

It is prohibited to:

• circumvent a suppression list by any means — address spelling variants, aliases, re-import, use of another account, another domain or another service;
• remove an address from a suppression list without a fresh expression of will from the recipient themselves;
• ignore an unsubscribe or objection request received through another channel.

Unsubscribe and objection requests must be honoured without delay. Suppression lists protect both recipients and the shared sending reputation: circumventing them is treated as a serious breach.

High bounce or complaint rates are the signal most closely watched by mailbox providers, and the fastest trigger of a reputation loss.

6.1. Hard bounce rate. Spore records every hard bounce and blocks subsequent sending to the address concerned. The hard bounce rate is measured per account and per sending domain, over a rolling period. The applicable threshold is 5 % of messages sent over that period.

The rolling calculation prevents a one-off spike on a small volume from triggering a measure. In addition, on very low volumes a rate is not statistically meaningful: a minimum volume of sends over the period is therefore required before the threshold can be enforced. [TO BE COMPLETED: minimum volume and calculation window]

Where that threshold is exceeded, we may, depending on severity and in a graduated manner:

• alert you and ask you to correct your practices;
• apply rate limiting to the account or the domain concerned;
• suspend sending from the domain concerned, then from the account, if the degradation persists.

6.2. Spam complaints. An excessive complaint rate is a serious breach of this policy.

As things stand, Spore does not operate feedback loops with the main mailbox providers and therefore does not measure an internal complaint rate. No numeric complaint threshold currently applies. We act on external signals:

• notification from a mailbox provider;
• listing of the service or of a sending domain on a blocklist;
• a report received at abuse@sporee.fr.

Measures taken on that basis follow the same graduation as under 6.1 and the safeguards of article 8.

Numeric complaint thresholds will apply once feedback loops are in place. They will be communicated to you beforehand, under the notice period provided for in article 11 for changes to this policy.

Creating several accounts to circumvent free-tier limits, a quota, a rate limit or a suspension is prohibited. The accounts concerned may be suspended or terminated without notice and without refund.

We may suspend immediately and without notice all or part of the sending from an account, a domain or an API key where necessary to prevent or stop harm to any of the following interests:

• the shared sending reputation and, consequently, the deliverability of other customers' messages;
• the security, integrity or availability of the service and its infrastructure;
• the legal compliance of the service, in particular where manifestly unlawful content is present or a competent authority has issued an order.

The absence of notice is justified by the immediate and largely irreversible nature of the harm: an unsolicited campaign in progress affects reputation within minutes, and a blocklist entry persists well after sending stops.

The measure taken is proportionate to the harm: we favour rate limiting, then suspension of the single domain or key concerned, before suspending the account.

Any suspension is notified to you by email, stating its grounds and the facts observed, as soon as possible and at the latest once doing so no longer compromises the effectiveness of the measure. You may submit your observations and request reinstatement at abuse@sporee.fr. We review your response and restore access once the harm has ceased and the necessary corrective measures have been taken.

In the event of a serious or repeated breach, access may be terminated under the terms of service.

Any recipient, mailbox provider, rights holder or third party may report abuse to abuse@sporee.fr. A useful report includes, as far as possible: the sender address, the date and time of receipt, the full message headers and a description of the grievance.

We undertake to review every report and to act promptly in respect of manifestly unlawful content notified to us, by removing access to the service for that content or suspending the sending concerned. The reporter is informed of the action taken. The customer concerned is informed of the measure and its grounds, and may submit observations under article 8.

A manifestly unfounded or abusive report does not give rise to any measure.

We may retain, for as long as necessary to handle a report or a dispute, the technical elements needed to establish the facts, and disclose them to a competent authority making a request in the legally prescribed form.

This policy may change, in particular to reflect mailbox providers' requirements. Any substantial change is notified to you by email at least thirty days before it takes effect, under the terms of service. Measures needed to stop an abuse in progress apply immediately.

This English version is provided for information. The French version is the authoritative one and prevails in the event of any discrepancy.

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