Acceptable use policy

Why this exists

Hosted Exchange is a shared platform. One customer sending unsolicited mail can put the sending reputation of the whole platform at risk, which means everybody else's legitimate mail starts landing in junk folders. This policy is how we prevent that.

Prohibited use

You must not use the service to:

• Send unsolicited bulk or commercial email, whether or not the recipients are your customers.
• Send mail with forged, disguised or misleading headers or sender addresses.
• Distribute malware, ransomware, or links intended to deliver either.
• Conduct phishing, impersonation or fraud, including invoice redirection.
• Harvest email addresses, or send to purchased or scraped lists.
• Store or transmit material that is unlawful, defamatory, or that infringes another party's rights.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the platform, to other customers' data, or to any connected system.
• Run automated processes that place a disproportionate load on the platform.
• Resell mailboxes to third parties without a written reseller agreement with us.

Marketing email

Genuine one-to-one business correspondence is unlimited. Bulk marketing — newsletters, campaigns, announcements to large lists — should be sent through a dedicated marketing platform rather than through Exchange. This is not us being difficult: a mail server that also sends campaigns is a mail server whose transactional mail eventually gets filtered.

Where you do send legitimate marketing from your domain, it must comply with PECR and UK GDPR, including consent where required and a working unsubscribe mechanism.

Sending limits

To protect platform reputation, mailboxes are subject to fair-use sending limits — by default 1,000 recipients per mailbox in any rolling 24-hour period, and 200 recipients per message. If your legitimate business needs more, tell us and we will raise it. Limits are there to catch compromised accounts, not to inconvenience you.

Your security obligations

• Use strong, unique passwords, and enable multi-factor authentication where we offer it.
• Tell us promptly if you suspect a mailbox has been compromised.
• Remove mailboxes for people who have left, promptly.
• Administer your organisation responsibly where you hold control panel access.

Enforcement

Where we identify a breach, our normal response is to contact you and work through it. Where mail is actively damaging platform reputation or a mailbox is demonstrably compromised, we may suspend that mailbox immediately and tell you afterwards — usually within minutes, and always the same day.

Suspension of a whole account happens only after written notice and a reasonable opportunity to remedy, except where the breach is unlawful or presents an immediate risk.

Reporting abuse

To report abuse originating from this platform, email abuse@myexchangeserver.co.uk with full message headers. We investigate every report.