AZC.COM Email Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) or Spam Policy

We strongly urge all our customers and potential customers to carefully review this page in its entirety. If any item in this posting is unclear, contact info@azc.com. Ignorance of the provisions outlined below shall not be accepted as an excuse.

Regrettably few people realize the full extent of the consequences of sending unsolicited bulk emails (UBE) or better known as spam. Not only does sending spam cause much damage and service interruptions to us and our customers, it also exposes the spammer to a host of legal liabilities, resulting in huge fines and penalties, and even imprisonment. We must emphasize and remind anyone not to send any unsolicited messages, especially as the definition of what is considered spam is becoming broader day by day.

AZC.COM has always had explicit policies regarding sending Unsolicited Commerce Email (UCE), Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) or commonly better known as spam. These policies are clearly expressed in both the service agreement and at http://www.azc.com/htmls/policy.html. Nothwithstanding these explicit prohibitions, a few customers still choose to disregard these policies, thereby endangering our own and our customers' ability to conduct business on the web.

We have therefore adopted a zero tolerance policy. To ensure that there are no misunderstandings, we will once more clarify our position, defining what is not permitted, outlining the response we will take when our policy is violated and highlight some of the potential legal exposure that that anyone who engages in spamming may have:

• Do not send out any Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE, also known as spam). We do not want to conduct business with anyone who does unsolicited bulk mailings.
• Spam-tising your website, i.e. sending out unsolicited bulk email promoting your site at AZC but using another ISP's servers to transmit these messages is absolutely prohibited. These prohibitions also encompass newsgroups and public mailing lists and bulletin boards. Do not flood newsgroups or public mailing lists. Even bulk emails with "opt-out" instructions are not permitted.
• You will be held liable for such infringment even if the spamming action was done by a third party for your benefit. I.e. if your advertising agency or one of your employees does the spamming, you would still be held responsible. If a sublessee of your site spams, accountability still remains with you.

In short, any kind of mass emailing is prohibited except in those cases where the recipient is a current, active customer of yours (i.e. purchased in the past 12 months) or has signed up on an opt-in email list. You will need to be able to present irrefutable proof of the foregoing if a recipient challenges you on this.

Failure to observe the above mentioned restrictions will result in:

• an immediate suspension and subsequent deletion of the hosting account, with full forfeiture of all setup and remaining hosting fees.
• recovery of all costs incurred by AZC.COM to undo any disruptions caused by the transmission of the UCE.
• our submission of the the spammer's domain name(s) to all anti-spam blocking databases, making the domain virtually unuseable even when the spammer transfers to another provider.

Note again that putting up a disclaimer stating that the email was sent in accordance to CAN-SPAM Act is not acceptable. It doesn't dissolve you of any liability - you would still be violating your service contract with AZC.COM. The terms in our service contact take precedence in this case, both in the practice of commercial laws and in the scope of the CAN-SPAM act.

In conclusion, we strongly urge you to consider the above. There is only one rule and it is very simple: DO NOT SPAM. If you are not sure whether you are spamming or not, then you probably are. In that case, stop right away.

faq's quick search