Anti-Spam Policy

Why this gets the quickest response

Reputation for mail attaches to a block of IP addresses rather than to any single account. Let one customer grind through a bought list and every other site sharing that block lands in junk folders for weeks, with no lever any of them can pull to make the recovery come faster.

All of which explains why the subject gets a page of its own, and why we halt a sending run first and hold the discussion afterwards.

1. What permission means

UK law, meaning the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations plus data protection law, generally wants consent before marketing mail arrives with a person. Consent is a deliberate act by the person themselves. A box already ticked for you is not consent, nor is an address handed over to enter a prize draw, nor one copied off a company website.

One narrow exception exists: someone who has already bought from you, contacted about similar goods, and given a way to refuse both at the point you collected the address and in every message you have sent since. That exception is narrower than most people assume.

Pick any address off your list and you should be able to state when permission arrived and by what route. Where you cannot, that list does not get used on our servers.

2. Lists picked up or purchased

Lists you bought or rented get refused outright, without exceptions and without any case-by-case argument. The same goes for addresses scraped off websites, directories or social media, and for a list that arrived with a business you acquired, unless the permission originally given stretches to what you now intend to send.

Writing to a questionable list to ask if people would like to stay on it repairs nothing. The asking message is itself the breach.

3. What needs to appear in every message

• a genuine sender, with no forged headers and no from-address dressed up as somebody else;
• a subject line honestly describing the contents below;
• an unsubscribe link that actually works, acted on at once and within three working days at the very latest;
• a postal address, plus the registered company sitting behind any trading name you happen to use.

An unsubscribe has no expiry date. Put that person back on because they completed some other form, or because the list now trades under a different name, and the breach restarts.

4. Limits on shared plans

Sending on shared and reseller plans is metered hourly, at a level matching what a website genuinely needs to send: order confirmations, password resets, contact-form notifications. Campaigns are not that.

Send newsletters through a provider whose actual product is delivery, one that reports back on what became of every message. Forcing a list down a shared hosting connection damages your own delivery rates well before it ever turns into a problem for us.

5. Sending for other people

Open relays are out, and so is sending on behalf of anybody whose permission practices you cannot personally vouch for. Run mail for clients and, from where we sit, what those clients do is down to you: your account is the thing we are able to act against.

6. When a run starts

What we watch is the shape of outbound mail, not its contents. Sending halts first and the conversation follows, because an hour of dithering can be the gap between a single warning and a blocklisting that takes weeks to clear for every customer on the block.

• Somebody got in. Usually the cause is a hijacked contact form or a stolen password, not anything anybody chose to do. Sending gets suspended, we tell you which route the mail took, and it comes back on once the hole is closed.
• You meant it. The account closes, with nothing refunded for the remainder of the term.

If an account puts a whole block of addresses onto a blocklist, we can bill that account for the delisting work and for shifting other customers onto clean addresses.

7. Reporting spam you received

Send it through report abuse with full headers. Tracing a message back to an account depends on the headers, since a forwarded body by itself usually leads nowhere at all.

8. Mail we send you

Mail about your services, your invoices and security reaches you regardless of what you choose, because it comes with having an account. Promotional mail is opt-in, and opting out of it leaves the operational messages untouched. The detail sits in the privacy policy.

9. The company

The trading name Hosting-Cheap belongs to Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15031604. Registered office: The Workspace Basildon, 7 High Pavement, Basildon, England, SS14 1EA. Questions to info@hosting-cheap.com.