Skip to content

Acceptable use

Last updated 2 November 2026.

Herald carries email that people asked for. Every project shares the reputation of the addresses and domains Herald sends from, so these rules protect everyone’s mail, including yours. They apply to every project and everyone who sends through it.

You must

  • Have permission. Send Proclamations (marketing) only to people who opted in to hear from you, and keep a record of when and how; Herald stores it with each contact. Dispatches (transactional email) must be about something the recipient did or asked for.
  • Make leaving easy. Every Proclamation carries one-click unsubscribe; don’t hide it, and don’t ask people to sign in to use it. Herald honours it at once.
  • Say who you are. Send from a domain you control and have verified, with a real postal address in every Proclamation.
  • Keep your lists clean. Remove addresses that bounce or complain (Herald does this for you), and don’t re-add people who left.

You must not

  • Send to bought, rented, borrowed or scraped lists, or to addresses you guessed.
  • Send phishing, malware, or anything that pretends to be someone else.
  • Disguise marketing as a Dispatch to get round someone’s unsubscribe.
  • Use misleading subjects, sender names or headers.
  • Send anything illegal where you or the recipient are, or anything that harasses, threatens or exploits anyone.
  • Try to reach another project’s data, get round Herald’s limits, quotas, suppressions or breakers, or spread one sender across several projects or domains to avoid them.

The lines

Mailbox providers ask senders to keep complaints under 0.1%, and never to reach 0.3%. Herald pauses a broadcast, and holds the project’s marketing, when complaints reach 0.2% or hard bounces reach 2% at any provider. New projects start with a low daily quota until the platform team has watched how their mail is received.

What happens when the rules are broken

We may hold a project’s marketing, lower its quota, pause it (its keys are refused and its queued mail is held), or close it. Where we can, we’ll tell you what we saw and what to change first; where mail is causing harm, we’ll act first and tell you straight after.

Reporting abuse

If you received mail sent through Herald that you didn’t ask for, tell us. We read every report.