Fair Usage Policy

Almashines offers packages bundled with limited or unlimited packages for members, emails and/or other resources. The use of Almashines’ products and services is governed by a Fair Use Policy, stated here, which covers the fair use of bandwidth and other resources on shared hosting plans, where there is an indication of “Unmetered/Unlimited” data transfer, members, emails or storage capacity.

For plans or packages featuring unlimited Members or emails, we do not enforce any official limitations. Customers are able to utilise as many of these features as they wish. That said, these are of course not infinite resources and there are inherent maximums associated with the technology powering them.

Storage

Following (including but not limited to), is NOT PERMITTED

1. Use of the account as massive file storage, or in other words, as a space for files that are not elements of your website.

2. Use of account as backup storage.

3. Storage of mass amounts of file archives (such as zip, rar, gzip,7z etc), video files, audio files, documents, log files etc. 

4. Hosting High Resource Intensive Web Portal under shared hosting. (In such case consider upgrading the account to a dedicated server plan)

5. Mass newsletter subscription-based services. (Consider a Dedicated server plan)

6. FTP or File Sharing services.

7. Sharing of your account with a 3rd party without consent.

8. Any illegal, copyrighted or pirated content 

Abusive Scripts/Processes

Any script/process/etc that adversely affects the ability of any other customer to satisfactorily use their provided services is forbidden. This includes, but is not limited to, CPU-intensive scripts and Processes for which the scale of traffic has exceeded the acceptable limits of a shared/reseller hosting environment. We only accept these only in our Dedicated Hosting environment.

Emailing Fair Usage & anti-spam Policy

At Almashines, our primary goal is to help our Organisations grow their active membership by helping them run successful campaigns. For this, we use high-quality services with built-in tools like Spam Test, Bounce Management, unsubscribe management, email verification etc. In lieu, we expect our users to use this as a high-quality communication channel and avoid abusing the tool for spamming.

By using Almashines, you agree to this Usage Policy and acknowledge that the rules mentioned below are mandatory and must be followed. Please read them carefully. We reserve the right to suspend your account if any of these is violated.

  • Valid & Relevant Members only 

There is a high risk of Spam Complaints or Bounces if you are sending emails to irrelevant audiences, or sending to non-existent and outdated email addresses. You should send emails to your subscribed members only.

You must ensure that your Subscribed members know that you will be sending them emails. You should also let them know how frequently they can expect to receive emails. By having this information upfront and easy for your subscribers to understand, you can ensure lower bounce, unsubscribe, and complaint rates.

  • Importing your existing subscribers

You are able to import your existing members without requiring an additional opt-in process by our service. Any member you import should have already opted-in to receive your emails. Importing members who have not directly requested emails from you in the past (using your own opt-in process) cannot be imported.

  • Paid lists, rented lists, borrowed lists, etc.

We do not allow any form of paid, rented, borrowed, etc. lists. If you did not directly get permission to send emails to a member you cannot use our bulk email service.

  • Low Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate triggers spam filters, and affects your email and domain reputation, as well as our IP reputation. When sending emails via Almashines, ensure your bounce rate does not go above 3% on any given day.

Excessive bounced emails can negatively impact the reputation of email infrastructure and the email service can be suspended by the Email service providers in case of a higher bounce rate.

  • CAN-SPAM Act Compliance

You should familiarise yourself with the CAN-SPAM Act and any related regulations in your country. Ensure your emails comply with these regulations.

  • Spam Complaints

We take spam complaints very seriously as it affects our IP reputation and puts our servers at risk. If we receive repetitive Spam Complaints from your campaigns, we reserve the right to suspend your account immediately.

This issue is usually caused if you are sending to irrelevant prospects or non-existent emails. Almashines email service expects complaint rates to remain below 0.1%. Senders with a complaint rate exceeding 0.5% risk a sending pause and/or complete ban.

  • Email content compliance

Your emails should not use any deceptive subject lines that misrepresent the content. The content should accurately be in line with the purpose of the community. You should not send emails for the topic for which members have not opted in (for eg. You should not send advertising emails to your existing members who have opted to receive only community and your organisation-related emails). 

  • Email Frequency 

The number of emails that an organisation can send to each member should be less than 4 emails per month including the automatic bulk platform generated emails. (This does not include automatic (transactional) emails generated when any user does any activity)

Excessive email frequency can result in an increased risk of email addresses being marked as spam, which can impact the reputation of your email infrastructure. Limiting the number of emails to each member will help you ensure that your email infrastructure is used in a responsible and sustainable manner.

  • Concurrent Email Threads

The number of concurrent email threads that an organisation can send through the platform will be 2 at any given time.

Allowing concurrent email threads can put additional strain on the platform’s infrastructure and email server, which can impact the performance and stability of the platform.

  • Namespace mining

Guessing the email addresses of prospects is a strict No as it goes against the terms of usage of email services that you integrate with and affects email deliverability.

We strongly discourage our users from indulging in this practice.

  • Unsubscribe link

You must have an unsubscribe link with every email sent. This is to comply with our terms and email-sending laws. We will automatically place an unsubscribe link in your emails to ensure you do not violate email-sending laws. A high unsubscribe rate is a strong indicator you are sending unsolicited emails (spam).

Member Data & Processes Management

  • Bulk User Import

The number of users that a client can add to the platform in bulk should be a maximum of 10,000 users at a time.

Adding a large number of users to the platform in bulk can put additional strain on the platform’s infrastructure, which can impact the performance and stability of the platform.

  • Concurrent Data Upload Processes

The number of concurrent data upload processes that a client can run on the platform can be 2 at any given time.

Too many concurrent data upload processes can put additional strain on the platform’s infrastructure and database, which can impact the performance and stability of the platform.

  • Associated members only

You agree to use the platform to add members who have a formal association with your organisation only. You cannot use the platform to represent a different or parent/child organisation (other than the one agreed under MOU/Order form document) under any of our subscription plans. You cannot use the platform to add members to a group which does not reflect the intent of the platform usage under our MOU/Order form.

  • Disk Space & Bandwidth

For packages supporting unlimited users or emails, we do not have defined limitations. Basic resources are “unmetered”, meaning you are not billed according to the amount of disk space or bandwidth used. While of course, these resources are not infinite, we believe our customers should have all the resources necessary to build an active presence and 99.5% of customers will have more than enough disk space and bandwidth to meet their needs.

That said, we do require all customers to be fully compliant with our fair usage policy and utilise disk space and bandwidth in a manner so that all your members have a smooth experience on the platform without any speed limitations. While rare, we occasionally constrain accounts utilizing more resources than should be. This generally happens with any combination of a very high concurrent users rate, high email rate, large total user database(>50,000), or guest visitor traffic on your platform.   

We regularly examine customer bandwidth and disk space utilization data in a series of statistical analyses and use the results to define “normal”. Although these tests vary from month to month, one thing remains constant: 99.5% of our customers fall into the “normal” range. If your account’s bandwidth or disk space utilization causes any concern, you will receive an email asking you to reduce usage or to consider a dedicated server plan. 

We may have to update this Fair Use Policy from time to time. The latest version can always be found at www.almashines.io/fair-usage-policy/