1) Overview
Maropost and its partners, only support permission based and lawful email/mobile marketing practices that comply with CASL, CAN-SPAM and TCPA.
2) Closed-Loop Authentication List Building
Maropost products enable clients to put an ‘opt-in’ form on their website. This feature collects and stores email addresses of permission-based recipients. All Maropost products have an option to use closed-loop authentication: an email address is not added to the recipient list until a link is clicked in the confirmation email. This process is implemented completely by the software.
3) Contact List Abuse Prevention
Our contact list hygiene system uses sophisticated algorithms to assess the probability that a list does not use closed-loop authentication. Any list that fails in the hygiene system is reviewed by Maropost.
Maropost technology automatically screens email campaigns for indicators of potential problems such as blacklisting and high spam scores. Any email campaign that surpasses a threshold is held until the Postmaster reviews and clears it.
To protect Maropost’s reputation, and that of its clients, Maropost offers to help new customers upload their first large email distribution list. This allows Maropost to view the contents of an email distribution list, with the customer’s permission. In addition, Maropost helps first time Maropost customers run a sample email campaign to a few select recipients from their list before sending to the rest.
4) Software Control Tools
Maropost provides its customers with certain tools to assist in compliance with the United States of America’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and Canada’s Anti-Spam Law. For example, Maropost products independently add an unsubscribe option to each email sent. Unsubscribes can be requested via a link in each email that goes to a landing page where user can unsubscribe from all or some lists.
This option cannot be removed by the customer; however, they can choose how it will be phrased. Anyone who unsubscribes will be automatically flagged in the database and their email address will be suppressed from all future mailings. Unsubscribe status can’t be overwritten by list merging. To further protect recipients from email abuse, contacts receiving email sent using the Maropost products will only see their own names in the ‘To’ field. No other recipients’ email addresses are visible.
5) Email Sending Practices
Maropost honors ISP policies (restrictions on number of connections, speed of sending servers, open relay off, reverse DNS enabled, RFC compliance). Authentication standards, such as sender policy framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), are used for outgoing email campaigns. Maropost products distinguishes between soft and hard bounces. Hard bounces are immediately flagged and suppressed from future mailings.
6) Suppression File Encryption
Maropost supports suppression file encryption according to the guidelines at www.espcoalition.org/sites/default/files/resources/suppression_file_encryption_requirement_member.pdf
7) Dealing with Complaints
As customers use Maropost systems, the number of complaints they receive is tracked by an internal reputation system. Customers with high number of complaints may be subject to list upload restrictions. Larger lists are uploaded not by the customer, but by Maropost upon the customer’s instruction, and may be subject to manual scrutiny.
When a complaint is received the following process is followed:
User address from complaints received via ISP FBLs are automatically unsubscribed. Complaints received directly from end users or via third party sources like SpamCop, are reviewed by our Postmaster team. The user address is unsubscribed and we track such reports. We may ask our customers to provide proof of consent in such cases. We may also ask our customers to reconfirm their lists, as needed.
Maropost reserves the right to assess a fee against clients of up to, the greater of $1,000 and 10% of their monthly fees, for each campaign delivered by the client reasonably deemed unacceptably spam heavy by Maropost, including, without limitation, due to complaints arising from Spamhaus, SURBL listings, mailbox providers or similar organizations, services or lists. These fees, which represents liquidated damages and not a penalty or fine, will be chargeable upon each incident of spam complaint or reasonable apprehension of spam heavy content. In addition to the above, and without prejudice to Maropost’s entitlement to fees owing under a subscription agreement, Maropost may, at its sole discretion, terminate the customer accounts of repeat, or otherwise egregious, offenders hereunder.
End users should only receive emails from our system sent on behalf of our customers that they recognize opting in to. We do not allow any customer to use our platform to send unsolicited email.
If you have received an unsolicited email from one of Maropost’s customers, please contact abuse@maropost.com
8) Acceptable Guidelines for Customers
Below are some guidelines around list collection, identification, unsubscribe and content requirements that need to be followed by all Maropost customers.
9) Consent
Maropost requires its customers to ensure they have proper opt-in permission (express or implied) for each recipient in their list. Customers are also required to produce proof of opt-in or prior relationship upon request. Customers are encouraged to ensure they are emailing end users only for the purposes for which their consent has been collected. For example: If abc@domain.com has consented to receive a one-time product update from Brand A, their email address should not be used to send Brand A’s general periodic email newsletter.
10) Express Consent
Recipients must express their choice to receive one or more type of emails. Note that consent must be collected using opt-in mechanism and not opt-out mechanism. The recipient must take positive action to indicate their consent. Note that express consent may be collected both orally or in writing.
Co-registration on a partner’s website may be acceptable so long as there are separate opt-in options for each list and recipient is presented with options and choices in a clear and conspicuous manner. For example: Recipient choice to consent to one email list should not be construed as consent to receive email from multiple partner lists
Below are some common sources of collecting express consent:
11) Implied consent
Recipients must have had a prior business or non-business relationship, in most cases within last two years. There are some other forms of implied consent as well like:
Below forms of acquiring email addresses may not provide adequate consent (not an exhaustive list):
12) Unsubscribe
Every email sent using Maropost platform must include a clear, conspicuous unsubscribe mechanism that is simple and easy to use. Maropostautomatically includes such functionality in the footer.
However, if customers wish to add additional unsubscribe links in the content, Maropost provides the option of using several ‘campaign tags’ to add an unsubscribe link in outgoing emails. Such unsubscribe requests are captured by Maropost software and relevant user addresses are automatically removed from the applicable mailing lists. Customers are responsible for choosing a ‘campaign tag’ that is optimized for their campaign type and recipient selection method. Customers are also responsible to make sure it is coded correctly within their email content.
In case customers use some other unsubscribe link, a plan should be in place to make sure users opting out using such means are marked as unsubscribed in Maropost.
We understand that this may not be entirely feasible, so we discourage customers from using non-Maropost unsubscribe links. Using unsubscribe links belonging to third party advertisers is very risky because the user never opted in to the advertiser and it is challenging to make sure all such users are properly unsubscribed in Maropost.
Maropost also advises customers to ensure singular opt in does not have multiple opt outs. Example: If end user is subscribing to List A, then sender should not auto subscribe user address to List B, List C and List D. in case sender does that, they should ensure that unsubscribe action in any email actually opts user out of all applicable lists (A,B,C,D).
13) Identification
Maropost requires its customers to accurately identify themselves in emails sent out of their account:
14) Content
We prohibit customers from sending certain type of content:
With regards to the From: domains, we require customers to ensure they maintain proper DNS entries – A (IP address), TXT (for SPF authentication records). Customers also need to ensure they have proper MX records for the Reply-to domain. It is also prohibited to use any form of Private WHOIS registration.
ISPs assign fair bit of reputation to From: domains and we discourage customers from rotating these domains frequently because ISPs regard this as an attempt to circumvent filtering. This includes rotating both the domain and the sub domain. Example: Similar mail should not be sent from many domains like ab.domain.com, bc.domain.com, de.domain.com, fg.domain.com, hi.domain.com, jk.domain.com. Instead all this mail should be set from domain.com.
In case of any questions or concerns, please feel free to email postmaster@maropost.com
1) Overview
Maropost and its partners, only support permission based and lawful email/mobile marketing practices that comply with CASL, CAN-SPAM and TCPA.
2) Consent
Maropost requires its customers to get prior written opt in consent in order to send text messages for marketing purposes. Customers are also required to produce auditable proof of opt-in upon request.
Consent must be unambiguous and clear details of the purpose of the messages must be provided. Customers are required to ensure they are sending text messages only for the purposes for which consent has been collected. For example: If consent has been captured for sending text receipts, sending other type of messages (like promotions, deals) is not allowed.
3) Content
We prohibit customers from sending certain type of content: