Acceptable use

01What Ruber is for

People writing to people, and the low-volume automated mail that goes with running something small: a contact form, a personal alert, a notification you set up for yourself.

02What belongs somewhere else

None of these are judgements about the practice; they are a statement about infrastructure. Sustained automated sending needs dedicated deliverability engineering and its own sending reputation, and running it through a mailbox harms both.

• Newsletters and marketing campaigns.
• Cold outreach and prospecting sequences.
• Transactional or application email at volume — password resets, receipts, verification codes.
• Bulk SMTP relay for another system.

03What is never allowed

• Spam, in the ordinary sense: unsolicited bulk mail to people who did not ask for it.
• Phishing, spoofing, or impersonating another person or organisation.
• Distributing malware, or linking to it.
• Harassment, threats, or content that is unlawful where you or the recipient are.
• Material that sexually exploits children. Reports of this are escalated immediately and referred to the relevant authorities.
• Attempting to breach, probe or overload our systems or anyone else's.
• Evading a suspension by opening another account.

04Limits

Every plan publishes what it allows, counted per day across the whole plan rather than per mailbox. Ordinary correspondence should never come near those numbers; sustained automated sending is the case they exist for.

We may apply additional technical limits where an account behaves in a way that threatens delivery for others.

05How this is enforced

Proportionately, and with a conversation first where circumstances allow. A first, apparently accidental breach usually means an email asking you to stop. Repeated or deliberate breaches, and anything in the never-allowed list, can mean immediate suspension.

If you think we have got it wrong, reply to the notice or write to hello@ruber.me. A person will read it.