The Problem
In the past several years, the Internet has exploded with commercial activity. The breaking down of barriers between businesses and consumers has been facilitated by the rapid development of new technology, removal of 'middlemen', and tax rates favorable to online entrepreneurship.

We at ActiveAdvertiser are proud to support responsible commerce on the Internet - this is represented in our service offerings and unparalleled support. However, it has become apparent that the same environment that has helped this trend take off has also contributed to numerous cases of fraud and abuse of network resources.

In particular, "spam" has proven to be a major problem for many of our customers and the Internet at large. Spam is a common slang term referring to the sending of unsolicited email, instant messaging, or other communication to a large group of people at once. Variations on this practice include off topic (and usually promotional) messages on bulletin boards, guestbooks, Usenet newsgroups, or chat rooms.

Spam is strictly against our Terms and Conditions, and will result in legal action to be taken by a number of third parties, including ISP services, User's, and Other involved parties.

The following policy dictates in specific terms what is considered acceptable use of bulk email/messaging by ActiveAdvertiser:

Subscriptions
Mailing list subscribers must specifically opt-into the list they are subscribed to. This applies to both new subscriptions and the bulk addition of addresses already subscribed via other means. Confirmation is handled using a single confirmation message sent to the subscriber's email address. This mailing must contain a URL to the site's privacy policy, a brief description of the mailing list, and a URL that the user must follow to confirm the subscription.

The nature of email address use must be fully disclosed, either on the page the subscription is made from or with a prominent link to the site's Privacy Policy. It must be made reasonably clear how a user's email address will be used and in what circumstances it will be shared.

Lists cannot be procured from outside parties unless the email sender has procured a list from an organization that sells or otherwise shares email distribution lists, and all of the following conditions are met:

The selling organization maintains a publicly viewable privacy policy disclosing that such sales may occur.

The privacy policy is prominently linked to from the page the subscriber signed up from.

The privacy policy has not changed substantially since the user signed up.

Records are kept of the date, time, IP address, and form location where the subscribing user signed up from.

Lists procured from outside parties must have been consistently handled in a manner comparable to ActiveAdvertiser policies.

Users cannot populate lists with addresses obtained for a substantially different purpose than was originally disclosed to the user.

All subscriptions must be re-confirmed in the manner described in Subscriptions (Section 1) before being sent bulk email messages.

Spamware
It is strictly prohibited in conjunction with your ActiveAdvertiser account to sell software designed specifically to facilitate the practice of spamming.