Acceptable use policy

Version 1.0 · Effective 28 July 2026

This policy is part of the terms of service. Breaching it breaches them.

Who this applies to

It applies to everyone with a Tendthread account and to everything sent through one, including the messages Tendthread drafts and sends on your behalf.

Tendthread sends from your own mailbox, under your own name. That is the point of the product, and it is also why this policy exists: when someone marks one of your messages as spam, the damage lands on your sending reputation first and on the mailbox integration every other customer depends on second. Rules that would be housekeeping at a bulk sender are load-bearing here.

What you must and must not do

• Have a lawful basis for contacting every lead. You must have your own lawful basis under UK data protection law for contacting each person you add to Tendthread, and you must be able to say what it is if you are asked. Tendthread does not supply that basis, verify it, or vouch for it on your behalf.The business-to-business exemption people rely on is narrower than it sounds. A sole trader or an unincorporated partnership is an individual subscriber and needs consent, and email to a named person at a company address can engage the same rules. Whether a given lead is fair game is a judgement only you can make, because only you know where the address came from.
• Never upload a purchased, rented or scraped list. Addresses you add must have been obtained by you and obtained legitimately — from your own network, an inbound enquiry, a conversation, or a source that publishes them for this purpose. Buying, renting, swapping or scraping a list breaches this policy, whatever the seller told you about its consent.Follow-ups go out through your own mailbox. Complaints attach to your sending reputation first and to Tendthread's standing with the mailbox providers second, and neither recovers quickly.
• Send as yourself. The sending name, the address and any company you name must be true and must identify you. Do not forge headers, disguise where a message came from, impersonate another person or business, or send from a domain chosen to be mistaken for someone else's.Concealing the identity of the sender of a marketing message is prohibited in its own right, separately from anything about consent, and every recipient must have a working address to reply to.
• Stop when you are asked to stop. If someone asks not to be contacted again, honour it across every lead and every campaign you run — not only in the thread the request arrived in — and do not add the address back later from another source.An objection is a right the recipient has exercised, not a preference to re-test next quarter. Tendthread stops automatically the moment it detects one; this rule is about not restarting it by hand.
• Do not send what this product is not for. Do not use Tendthread for unlawful, deceptive, harassing, defamatory or sexually explicit messages; for phishing, malware or fraud; for chain letters or pyramid schemes; or to promote offerings you are not authorised to promote, including financial products, gambling, prescription medicines, controlled substances and firearms.
• Keep it person to person. Tendthread is for considered follow-up to leads you could name and describe. Do not use it for bulk, untargeted or automated mass sending, and do not work around its per-lead workflow with tooling that submits addresses in bulk.The product is deliberately not a blast platform. What makes its email worth receiving is that a person could have written it, and that stops being true at volume.

Being able to answer for a lead

The practical test is simple: for any lead in your account, could you say where the address came from and why contacting that person is justified? If the answer is no, do not add them. Keeping a note of the source at the point you add a lead costs nothing and is the only thing that helps later.

Two cases catch people out. A named person at a company address is still a person, and the exemption you may be relying on is about the organisation rather than about them. And an address belonging to a sole trader or an unincorporated partnership is treated as an individual one, which needs their consent rather than your judgement about relevance.

How Tendthread justifies holding lead data on its own account, and how someone objects to it, is set out in the privacy policy. That is separate from your obligation and does not discharge it.

Identifying yourself

Every message must make clear who it is from, and must leave the recipient a working way to reply and be removed. Replying to the thread is that route in Tendthread, and it works — an objection is acted on before anything else in the system decides what to do with the reply.

Do not send from a domain chosen to be mistaken for someone else's, do not misstate the business you represent, and do not disguise where a message originated. This holds whether or not the recipient needed to consent to receive it.

Suspension and termination

Tendthread may suspend or close your account immediately and without notice if spam complaints, bounce rates or abuse reports arising from your sending reach a level that threatens other customers or our standing with the mailbox providers, or if we have reasonable grounds to believe this policy has been breached. Where the problem can be put right, we will tell you what would need to change.

In practice that means sending stops, follow-ups already scheduled are cancelled, and the account may be closed under the terms of service. If you think a suspension is wrong, write to hello@tendthread.com and we will look at it again.

Reporting a breach

If you received an email sent through Tendthread and it breaches this policy — or you simply do not want to hear from that sender again — reply to it and say so. That stops the follow-ups automatically.

To reach us instead, write to hello@tendthread.com, or to privacy@tendthread.com if what you want is your data removed. Reports about a customer are acted on; we will not tell you what we did about a specific account.