Sending & acceptable use policy

What you can send

Ordinary personal and business correspondence — mail to people who expect to hear from you.
Light transactional mail from your own site or app: signup confirmations, password resets, receipts, order notifications, alerts.
Mail to your own team, customers and suppliers in the normal course of business.

What you cannot send

No bulk or marketing email of any kind. This includes newsletters, promotional campaigns, product announcements to a list, cold outreach and drip sequences — and it applies even when every recipient double opted in. We know that's stricter than some hosts. It's the rule that keeps our sending reputation intact for everybody else on the platform.

Also prohibited: unsolicited mail of any sort, purchased or scraped lists, phishing or spoofing, malware distribution, harassment, mail that infringes copyright, and anything unlawful where you or your recipients are.

If you need to send campaigns, run them through a dedicated bulk provider such as Mailchimp, Postmark, Brevo or SendGrid. Using them alongside your MailToYou mailbox is fine and very common — keep your correspondence here and your campaigns there.

Sending limits

The current limit is 600 emails per hour, per domain, counting messages to recipients outside your own domain. We may adjust this if circumstances require.

On personal plans (mailboxes at @mailtoyou.org) that hourly allowance is shared across everyone using the domain, so personal plans are sized for personal correspondence rather than automated sending. If you need to send from an application, use a domain plan where the allowance is yours alone.

If you're a legitimate sender running into the ceiling, open a ticket once your account has a bit of history and we'll review an increase case by case. We've raised limits for businesses and open source projects before.

How we enforce this

Outbound mail passes through filtering relays that block spam and viruses before they leave our network. We monitor spam complaint rates and bounce rates. Where mail volume or complaints suggest bulk sending or a compromised account, we may rate-limit or suspend outbound sending, and we'll contact you about it.

Serious or repeated breaches can end in termination. Where we reasonably can, we'll talk to you first — most problems are a misconfigured script or a stolen password, not bad intent.

Compromised accounts

If your account starts sending spam because someone got your password, we'll suspend outbound sending to protect you and everyone else, then help you regain control. Turn on two-factor authentication and use app passwords for your mail clients; it prevents almost all of these incidents.

Reporting abuse

To report abuse from a MailToYou address, email abuse@mailtoyou.org with full message headers. We investigate every report.