TG Computer Servers Email Policy

We maintain zero tolerance for sending of unsolicited email, bulk emailing, and spam. “Safe lists” and purchased lists will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

Websites advertised via SPAM (Spamvertised) may not be hosted on our servers. This provision includes, but is not limited to SPAM sent via fax, phone, postal mail, email, instant messaging, or usenet/newsgroups. No organization or entity listed in the ROKSO found here http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso may be hosted on our servers.

Any account which results in any of our IP addresses being blacklisted will be immediately suspended and/or terminated.

We reserve the right to require changes or disable as necessary any website, account, database, or other component that does not comply with established policies, or to make any modifications in an emergency in our sole discretion.

We reserve the right to charge the holder of the account used to send any unsolicited e-mail a clean up fee or any charges incurred for blacklist removal. The cost of the clean up fee is at our sole discretion.

Limits

There is a 500 emial per hour outgoing limit per domain. This limit is also applied towards Mailman. If you send over this amount in any hour, most of the emails will bounce back with an undeliverable error. If this occurs, it will then take some time for your account to be able to send again so we recommend waiting at least 1 hour after this issue occurs to begin sending email again.

There is a limit of 30 POP3/IMAP checks per hour per each user’s connecting IP address. If you go over this you’re likely to get a wrong password error message or an error stating “login incorrect”. If this occurs, please wait an hour and it will automatically unblock you. To prevent this from happening again, please make sure to disable auto checking or at least set it to something higher such as once every 10 minutes.

Any mailing list larger than 5,000 addresses will require a dedicated server or VPS hosting solution from us. Note: Dividing one large list into smaller lists to get below this limit is not permitted.

There is also a limit to the number of Mailman mailing lists according to you hosting plan. This limit does not apply to other mailing list programs such as PHPList.

Email Rules

1. Any time you’re sending a message, no matter how large your email list, you must throttle it. We recommend you throttle it to at the very least send 1 email every 8 seconds. Sending 1 every 8 seconds would send 450 emails within 1 hour, keeping you below the 500 outgoing email limit. If the mailing list software you’re using does not allow you to throttle you must switch to an application or script that will. PHPList, an open source program, can do this for you.

IMPORTANT: If you do not throttle and you try sending 500 emails, the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which may cause a very high load on the server and the entire server will be sluggish, potentially affecting your site and service, until this sending process is completed. It is our job to keep the server up and running without being sluggish or experiencing issues. Anyone who causes the server’s load to go high will be suspended and the process will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle, you will most likely be suspended for crashing the server.

2. Any mailing list over 900 email addresses is only allowed to be sent to during off-peak times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday, and 1AM – 8AM Eastern Standard Time, Monday through Friday.

3. The list must be a Double Opt-In list. This means a user has subscribed for a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it and confirming the email address to be their own. Confirmation is usually done by responding to a notification/confirmation email sent to the email address the end user specified. The double opt-in method eliminates the chance of abuse where somebody submits someone else’s email address without their knowledge and against their will. You will not be permitted to mail any mailing list that you were given or purchased. In doing so, this will also be considered spamming and may result in termination of the offending account.

4. Any unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in suspension or termination of the offending account. We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail and other forms of spam.

5. Any mailing list MUST comply with all guidelines set forth by the United States government. These can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm .

6. No direct SMTP mailers are allowed. An example of this would be a Darkmailer or The Bat!. Any mail should be sent through the local mail server/MTA for further delivery by the server and not done directly by scripts.