Acceptable Use Policy

1. Scope

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) applies to everyone who uses MessageFuel and to everything sent through it — SMS, MMS, email, signup forms, embedded scripts and hosted pages. It is part of the Terms of Use, and breaching it is a material breach of that agreement.

The rules below are not house style. They are the conditions that mobile carriers, mailbox providers and US law impose on anyone who sends bulk messages, and our ability to deliver anything at all depends on every customer meeting them. One sender with a bad list damages deliverability for the platform.

Where this policy is stricter than the law, follow this policy. Where the law is stricter, follow the law.

2. Consent — the rule everything else rests on

You may only message people who gave you permission to message them, on the channel you are using, for the kind of content you are sending. You must be able to produce evidence of that permission on request.

• Marketing SMS requires prior express written consent. The person must have affirmatively agreed — a ticked box they ticked themselves, a keyword they texted in, a form they submitted — to receive marketing texts from you specifically, at the number they provided, with the disclosure the law requires beside the agreement. Consent may not be a condition of purchase.
• The disclosure must be visible at the moment of consent. Your identity, that message and data rates may apply, the expected message frequency, how to opt out (reply STOP), how to get help (reply HELP), and a link to your privacy policy and terms.
• Consent does not transfer. It belongs to the business that collected it, for the purpose it was collected for. Consent given to a company you acquired, a partner, an affiliate or a previous list owner is not consent given to you, and consent to receive a receipt is not consent to receive marketing.
• Consent goes stale. Do not message a list that has not been contacted in over a year without re-permissioning it.

The platform records a consent event — the source, the exact wording shown, the timestamp, and the IP address and browser where applicable — for every signup form submission and every opt-out. When you import a list you are attesting to consent you obtained elsewhere, and that attestation is recorded too. Keep your own records as well.

3. Prohibited and restricted content

Never permitted

• Anything unlawful, or that promotes, facilitates or instructs on unlawful activity.
• Fraud, phishing, spoofing, impersonation of a person or organisation, fake invoices or shipping notices, or any attempt to obtain credentials, payment details or identity documents under false pretences.
• Malware, spyware, ransomware, or links to sites that distribute them or exploit a browser.
• Child sexual abuse material, content that sexualises minors, or any depiction of non-consensual sexual activity — which we report to the authorities.
• Content that harasses, threatens, defames, or incites violence or hatred against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Content that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark or other rights — see the Copyright and Trademark Policy.
• Deceptive claims, undisclosed paid promotion, and misleading subject lines, sender names or preview text.

Restricted by carriers and mailbox providers

US mobile carriers block or heavily filter certain categories regardless of consent. These are commonly known as SHAFT — sex, hate, alcohol, firearms and tobacco — plus a set of high-risk financial and health categories. Do not send about the following on SMS without our prior written approval and, where the carriers require it, a specifically approved campaign registration:

• adult or sexually explicit content; cannabis, CBD, kratom, vaping and tobacco products; alcohol without age gating; firearms, ammunition and weapons;
• gambling, sweepstakes, lotteries and contests; payday, short-term or high-cost loans; debt collection, debt consolidation, debt relief and credit repair;
• cryptocurrency, digital assets, get-rich-quick and work-from-home offers, multi-level marketing and affiliate lead generation;
• prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals, and any health claim that requires substantiation.

Some of these are also regulated for email. Sending them without approval is the fastest route to having your traffic blocked at the carrier and your account suspended here.

Regulated data

Do not send protected health information subject to HIPAA, cardholder data subject to PCI DSS, government identification numbers, financial account numbers, passwords, or biometric data through the platform, and do not store them in contact fields. MessageFuel is not built for those categories, we do not sign Business Associate Agreements, and message content passes through providers who are not contracted for them.

4. Prohibited practices

• Opt-out evasion. Re-importing a contact who opted out, moving a suppressed contact to another list, account or organisation, using a second sending number or domain to reach someone who unsubscribed, or making the opt-out harder than the opt-in.
• Filter evasion. Obscuring words to defeat carrier filters, rotating numbers or domains to spread volume and avoid reputation tracking (“snowshoeing”), cloaking a link’s real destination, using a URL shortener that hides the target, or spinning content to look like unique messages. MessageFuel’s own tracked links are the exception: when you turn on link tracking for a text, each link is rewritten to a MessageFuel short link that records the click and sends the recipient to the destination you entered. We may disable a tracked link that leads somewhere this policy prohibits.
• Misrepresenting the sender. Forged headers, a From name that is not you, a reply-to that goes nowhere, or a sending domain designed to look like someone else’s.
• Bad list hygiene. Continuing to mail addresses that hard bounce, ignoring complaint rates, or repeatedly sending to a list you have not cleaned. A spam-trap hit is a signal that your list was not collected the way you think it was.
• Harvesting. Using the platform, a signup form or an embed to collect contact data other than through a person’s own voluntary submission.
• Platform abuse. Probing or circumventing rate limits, tenancy boundaries or security controls; automating the interface to exceed limits; sharing one account across unrelated businesses; or reselling the Service outside the Agency and Reseller Terms.

5. Requirements for every message you send

• Identify yourself. Every message must make clear which business is sending it, in the message body or in the sender identity.
• Offer an opt-out, every time. Marketing email must carry a working unsubscribe link and a one-click unsubscribe header. Marketing SMS must honour STOP, and should say so at least in the first message of a programme.
• Include a physical address. CAN-SPAM requires a valid postal address in every marketing email. The platform appends one automatically from your settings or your sender identity, and it must be a real address you can receive mail at.
• Respect quiet hours. Do not send marketing texts outside 8:00 to 21:00 in the recipient’s local time, and observe any stricter state rule that applies. Florida’s Telephone Solicitation Act is stricter than the federal baseline and applies to messages sent to Florida numbers.
• Honour opt-outs immediately. Federal law allows ten business days for an email unsubscribe; the platform applies it instantly and so should you.
• Keep frequency to what you disclosed. If you said four messages a month, do not send twenty.

6. SMS and carrier rules

• Register before you send. Application-to-person messaging on US 10-digit long codes requires A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration. Sending unregistered traffic gets it blocked and can incur carrier penalties charged to you.
• Register accurately. The sample messages, opt-in description, use case and call-to-action you submit must describe what you will actually send and how you will actually collect consent. Carriers audit against the registration, and a mismatch invalidates the campaign.
• Support HELP and STOP. Both keywords, and their common variants, must work. The platform handles them; do not attempt to disable or intercept them.
• Stay within your throughput. Your registered campaign carries a message-per-second limit. The platform paces sends to it. Do not attempt to exceed it by running parallel accounts or numbers.
• One number, one programme. Do not send unrelated messaging programmes from the same registered campaign, and do not share a sending number across unrelated businesses.

7. Email rules

• Authenticate your domain. Send from a domain you control, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place. Free-mailbox From addresses (gmail.com, yahoo.com and the like) fail DMARC alignment at the receiver and must not be used as a marketing From address.
• Verify the identity you send from. The platform blocks sending from an unverified sender identity. Do not work around that by sending as someone else.
• Do not disable the compliance footer. The unsubscribe link and postal address are appended at send time and are not optional.
• Match the subject line to the content. Misleading subject lines and deceptive preview text breach CAN-SPAM independently of anything else in the message.
• Segment before you blast. Sending your entire list irrespective of engagement is the most reliable way to acquire a spam-trap hit and a blocklisting.

8. Reporting abuse

If you received a message you did not consent to, or one that breaks these rules, tell us at Info@messagefuel.com. Include the message itself, the sending number or email address, and the date. The full message with headers helps most.

We investigate every report. We will not share your details with the sender without your permission, though acting on a complaint sometimes makes the source obvious to them. Reporting to us does not replace your right to complain to the FTC, the FCC or your state attorney general.

9. How we enforce this policy

Where there is time and the situation allows it, we start with a conversation: we tell you what we are seeing and give you a chance to fix it. Where recipients, other customers or our provider relationships are at immediate risk, we act first and explain afterwards.

• throttling a send, or pausing a campaign mid-flight;
• disabling a sending identity, a signup form or an integration;
• suspending an account pending evidence of consent;
• terminating the account under the Terms of Use, without refund; and
• reporting to carriers, mailbox providers, our delivery providers or law enforcement where we are required to, or where the conduct warrants it.

We may ask you to produce your consent records for a specific recipient. Being unable to is itself a breach of this policy.

This policy will change as carrier and mailbox provider requirements change. The effective date at the top reflects the current version; material changes are notified to account holders in advance.

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