Acceptable Use Policy (Updated 10/15/2003)

It is in the best interests of ZDirect and our customers to protect email recipients from abuse. By protecting the rights of email recipients, we guard against service providers taking action against our industry and help to ensure the long-term viability of email as a communications channel. With this in mind, ZDirect's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) is designed to protect our customers' ability to send while simultaneously respecting the recipient's inbox.

ZDirect respects the email recipients inbox.

• ZDirect is an application/email service provider for managing and sending to opt-in email lists. We have a wide array of customers, including public and private companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies.
• ZDirect supports responsible e-commerce, and prohibits the use of our services and network for sending unsolicited bulk email.
• We offer an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe from all of our lists. If you would like to submit a complaint against one of our list owners, please send a copy of the email, with full headers, to nospam@zdirect.com. Your complaint will be registered against the list owner. Penalties may include suspension, imposition of license fees, and termination of accounts.
• If you have questions or concerns about this policy, please write to privacy@zdirect.com.

For Internet Service Providers, ZDirect respects your system and your customers' rights.

While we do our best to keep our system free from abuse, proactively educate our customers regarding best current practices, and act swiftly when abuse does occur, complaints do happen. We handle every complaint sent to us.

If users on your system complain about messages sent from our service, please forward the message in question with full headers and with the original recipient's email address intact to nospam@zdirect.com.

This is an automatic processor that will register the complaint against the list and notify the ZDirect Standards and Practices staff. We will handle complaints in accordance with our Acceptable Use Policy. Actions may include account suspension, imposition of fines, and account termination.

If you are responsible for a large network, we will be happy to set up a custom complaint channel for your users. When your users complain to you regarding unsolicited email from any of our domains, you can forward the complaints to us and we will register the complaint against our customer. You may also specify an acceptable complaint threshold, and if that is reached, that customer will be automatically prohibited from sending any further mail into your domain. If you would like us to set up a custom complaint channel for your domain, please contact us at privacy@zdirect.com.

If you have questions or concerns about our policies, please contact us at privacy@zdirect.com.

The following are the founding principles for our policies:

1. Opt-in
• Recipients must explicitly request to receive our customer's email with the understanding that the customer has properly set expectations regarding frequency and content.

2. One subscription, one removal
• Each subscription is an opt-in to a specific list of a specific entity and/or its marketing partner. Recipients must be able to stop receiving email with a single request.

The following rules govern the use of the ZMail system:

1. Frequency

• Customers must determine the frequency as to which their recipients are mailed to as not to fatigue them.

2. Rules Governing Co-Registration

• Subscriptions may only be generated by recipients explicitly opting-in to specific lists.
• Uniqueness: Any single registration, or individually checked box, may result in subscription to at most one unique entity and/or its marketing partner. Additionally, a single registration may result in an address being uploaded to our system only once.
• Timeliness: Mailings must commence within 30 days of original signup.
• Notification: The initial message sent to recipient addresses collected with co-registration must be an introductory message describing how the addresses were obtained, the content of the mailings, and the frequency of the mailings.

3. Documentation

• For recipient addresses collected through online methods, customers must collect and maintain opt-in documentation, which must include the IP address, date, timestamp, and exact URL of subscription.
• For addresses collected through offline methods of registration, documentation must include appropriate information detailing the relationship to the recipient and when and how the recipient asked to be subscribed.
• ZDirect reserves the right to require documentation at the time addresses are uploaded.
• ZDirect reserves the right to disclose opt-in documentation, and in the case of a valid legal complaint, customer name and contact information.

4. Accountability and Liability

• List owners are solely responsible for their subscription generation methods, and assume all liability for any vendors, co-registration providers, contractors or brokers used to assist them in generating subscriptions. It is the list owners' responsibility to guarantee vendors', contractors', and brokers' adherence to ZDirect regulations.

5. Use of Other Services

• ZDirect customers are not allowed to send unsolicited commercial email (UCE) through any other vendors or systems.
• List owners may not use another service to "list clean" or "list wash" a list hosted with ZDirect, nor to create documentation for a list hosted with ZDirect.

6. Evading License Limits

• ZDirect Mail list owners may not use multiple uploads and removals to circumvent the license level. For example, if you wish to send to 100,000 recipients, you may not open a 10,000 recipient list and send to 100,000 recipients in 10 unique uploads of 10,000 recipients each.

7. Timeliness

• Customers are expected to respond to ZDirect inquiries in a timely fashion. Failure to do so may result in a temporary suspension.

8. Unsubscribed and Bounced Addresses

• ZDirect does everything possible to ensure that unsubscribed addresses are removed from lists quickly. List owners may not re-upload unsubscribed or pruned addresses without a new, fully documented subscription request. In the case where the recipient has previously requested an unsubscribe, the list owner must confirm the new subscribe request in a double-opt-in fashion.

9. Upload of Non-Opt-In Addresses

• ZDirect has software that detects non-opt-in addresses at the time of upload. List owners may not attempt to circumvent this automated process.