Acceptable Use Policy

HEADS UP — TEMPLATE. This AUP is intentionally direct and covers the abuses that matter most for a hosted-mail provider. It's a reasonable starting point but a lawyer should review for your jurisdiction. The author is not your lawyer.

Last updated: 2026-05-15

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") describes the conduct expected of Talking Unicorn users. Violating it can lead to suspension or termination of your account. The AUP is part of our Terms of Service.

The short version

Don't do anything with your Talking Unicorn account that you'd be ashamed of if it ended up in your local newspaper. Don't send spam. Don't harass people. Don't host malware. Pay your bills. We try to be reasonable; we expect the same.

What's prohibited

Sending unsolicited bulk mail (spam)

You may not use the Service to send messages to people who haven't agreed to receive them. Specifically:

• No buying or scraping email lists.
• No "we have a business relationship because you bought from us in 2017" stretches.
• No "if you don't reply within 24 hours we'll assume you're interested" cold outreach pretending to be transactional.
• No newsletters to recipients who didn't explicitly opt in (CAN-SPAM compliance — confirmed opt-in is best practice).

We monitor outbound mail for spam-like patterns and our automated system can suspend sending if a tenant's mail starts scoring high. See the auto-suspend notification template and Terms for what that looks like in practice.

If you have a high-volume legitimate sending use case (newsletter publisher, transactional mail at scale), tell us before you start. We can put you on a dedicated IP tier rather than have you trip the shared-IP defenses.

Harassment, threats, abuse

Don't use Talking Unicorn to harass, stalk, threaten, dox, or otherwise inflict harm on any individual. We define this broadly. If a recipient reports your account for sending threatening or abusive messages, we will investigate, and if the reports are credible we will suspend.

Phishing and impersonation

• No phishing campaigns. Period.
• No impersonating other companies, brands, or government agencies in your sender identity, subject lines, or body content.
• No spoofing your From address to pretend to be someone you're not. (Our infrastructure prevents you from doing this for domains you don't control; trying to bypass that gets your account suspended.)

Malware and exploits

• No sending malware, ransomware, viruses, trojans, or any other malicious code.
• No links to credential-harvesting pages or drive-by-download sites.
• No using the Service to probe, scan, or attempt to penetrate other systems.
• No proxying traffic for other services in a way that hides their origin from spam filters.

Illegal content

• No CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Ever. We report any discovered CSAM to NCMEC and law enforcement.
• No human trafficking, drug trafficking, or weapons trafficking operations.
• No coordinating violence, terrorism, or attacks on critical infrastructure.
• No fraud, money laundering, or other illegal financial activity.

If your jurisdiction or your recipients' jurisdiction makes specific content illegal, comply with that law — not just US law.

Excessive resource use

• No cryptocurrency mining or other compute-heavy abuse of our infrastructure (we don't sell compute; you'd be misusing storage and bandwidth).
• No deliberately consuming disk, CPU, or bandwidth at a rate inconsistent with normal mail use to extract value beyond your subscription tier.
• No automated mass-creation of accounts.

Evading our abuse controls

Don't try to get around the automated rate limits, the domain verification gate, the outbound spam filter, the IP-pool assignment, or any other abuse-prevention measure. We notice this and treat it as escalation.

Reselling

You can use the Service for your own business, including using mailbox aliases for clients you do work for. You cannot resell Talking Unicorn as a white-labeled service to your own paying customers without a separate reseller agreement. Write to hello@talkingunicorn.email if you want to talk about that.

What happens if you violate this

Roughly, in order of severity:

1. Friendly warning email to your admin address. For first-time minor stuff (e.g. one accidentally-spammy newsletter).
2. Automated outbound suspension. The auto-suspend worker may flip your account before a human reviews it. You'll get an email explaining why; reply and we'll review.
3. Manual operator suspension. A human at Talking Unicorn reviews and pauses sending. You'll receive a specific list of what we saw and what we'd need to see change.
4. Account termination. For serious or repeated violations (CSAM, phishing operation, persistent spam). No refund.
5. Reporting to authorities. For activity that's illegal under applicable law. We comply with valid legal process.

We try to give a chance to remediate where the violation seems unintentional (compromised mailbox, misconfigured marketing tool). For deliberate abuse, we skip straight to suspension.

Reporting abuse

If you've received abuse from a Talking Unicorn address, write to abuse@talkingunicorn.email. Include the original message with full headers if possible. We act on abuse reports within one business day.

If you're a victim of harassment by a Talking Unicorn user and need urgent help, write to abuse@talkingunicorn.email with "URGENT" in the subject. We read those first.

Updates

We may update this AUP. Material changes will be communicated by email to your admin address with at least 30 days' notice.

Contact

• Abuse reports: abuse@talkingunicorn.email
• Policy questions: legal@talkingunicorn.email