Anti-Spam Policy

Why this one is strict

Reputation for mail attaches to an address range, never to a single account. One customer grinding through a bought list can drop every other site on that range into junk folders for weeks, and no amount of effort from the innocent parties will hurry the recovery along. That imbalance is why we move quicker here than anywhere else in these documents.

1. Permission, and what actually counts as it

Under UK law, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations sit alongside data protection law and normally require consent before marketing mail reaches an individual. Consent is an act the person performs. A box that arrives already ticked does not qualify. Neither does an address typed in to enter a competition, nor one lifted off a company website.

One narrow carve-out exists: somebody who has already bought from you, hearing about comparable products, having been offered a refusal at the point you collected the address and in every message since. Most senders assume it stretches a great deal further than it does.

Take any address on your list: you ought to be able to state when permission arrived and by what route. No record, no send.

2. Lists that somebody else built

Lists you bought and lists you rented are turned away, with no case-by-case discussion. The same applies to addresses scraped from directories, websites or social platforms, and to a list that arrived with a business you acquired, unless the original permission reaches as far as what you now intend.

Writing to a doubtful list in order to ask whether the recipients want to be there does not repair anything. That message is the breach in itself.

3. What every message has to show

• an honest sender: genuine headers, and a from-address that really is what it claims;
• a subject line that matches what follows;
• an unsubscribe that works, honoured at once and within three working days at the latest;
• a postal address, plus the registered company sitting behind any trading name.

An unsubscribe has no expiry date. Adding somebody back because they later completed a different form, or because the list now carries a new name, restarts the breach from the beginning.

4. Shared plans and volume

Outbound mail on shared and reseller plans is metered hour by hour. That allowance exists for what a website genuinely sends: receipts, password resets, notifications from a form. Campaigns are not what it is for.

A newsletter belongs with a provider whose product is managing sending reputation and reporting on delivery. Forcing a list through shared hosting damages your own open rates long before the matter ever reaches us.

5. Relays, and sending on behalf of others

No open relays. Nothing sent for a third party whose permission practices you cannot personally vouch for. As far as we are concerned, a reseller owns the behaviour of every customer beneath them, because the account is the thing we are able to act on.

6. When a run starts

What we monitor is the shape of outbound traffic, not the contents of it. Once a run starts, sending is halted first and the conversation follows. One hour of hesitation separates a quiet note to a single customer from a delisting exercise that lands on everybody.

• Broken in. Spam leaving a hosting account is usually a hijacked form or a leaked password rather than anybody's decision. Sending gets suspended, we tell you where it came from, and it goes back on once the hole is closed.
• Sent on purpose. The account is closed, and whatever remains of the term is not refunded.

Should an account get a range blocklisted, the cost of delisting, and of shifting other customers onto clean addresses, may be charged back to that account.

7. Reporting spam you received

Send it through report abuse with complete headers. Headers matter: without them a report can seldom be tied to any account, and a forwarded message body by itself rarely leads anywhere.

8. Mail we send you

Service, billing and security messages arrive whatever you do, since they form part of running the account. Promotional mail is opt-in, and unsubscribing from it never touches the operational side. The detail sits in the privacy policy.

9. The company

HostingFast is a trading name of Vitalcare at Home Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under Company No. 15098204. Registered office: Office 4648, 221–323 High Road, Chadwell Heath, Romford, England, RM6 6AX. Questions to info@hostingfastnet.com.