Anti-Spam Policy

Last Updated: May 15, 2024

ValidEmailChecker provides email verification and list cleaning services designed to help legitimate businesses improve the quality of their email communications. Our service exists to reduce bounces, protect sender reputation, and ensure that marketing emails reach real, engaged recipients. It does not exist to enable, facilitate, or support the sending of unsolicited commercial email — commonly known as spam.

This Anti-Spam Policy outlines what we consider acceptable and unacceptable use of our service. By creating an account or using ValidEmailChecker in any capacity, you agree to comply with this policy. Violations will result in immediate and permanent account termination without refund.

1. Our Position on Spam

ValidEmailChecker has a zero-tolerance policy toward spam. We define spam as any unsolicited bulk email sent to recipients who have not given their explicit, informed, and verifiable consent to receive communications from the sender. This includes, but is not limited to, commercial advertising, promotional offers, newsletters, and marketing messages sent to individuals who did not opt in to receive them. Verifying an email address through our service does not constitute permission to email that person. Our verification confirms deliverability — it does not create, imply, or substitute for consent.

2. Acceptable Use

ValidEmailChecker is intended for use by businesses and individuals who maintain permission-based email lists and want to improve the quality and deliverability of their legitimate communications. Acceptable uses of our service include verifying email lists where every recipient has provided explicit opt-in consent to receive emails from you, cleaning existing customer or subscriber lists to remove invalid, outdated, or undeliverable addresses, validating email addresses at the point of collection (such as signup forms, registration pages, or checkout flows) to prevent typos and fake submissions, verifying contact lists obtained through legitimate business relationships where you have a reasonable basis to communicate with the recipient, and using our API to integrate real-time email validation into your applications and workflows for the purpose of maintaining data quality.

In all of these cases, the fundamental requirement is the same: you must have a lawful and verifiable basis to email every address you verify through our service.

3. Prohibited Use

The following activities are strictly prohibited and will result in immediate account termination:

Verifying purchased or rented email lists. If you purchased a list of email addresses from a data broker, list vendor, lead generation company, or any other third party, you may not verify those addresses through ValidEmailChecker. Purchased lists are inherently non-consensual — the individuals on those lists did not give you permission to contact them, and verifying those addresses through our service does not change that fact. This prohibition applies regardless of how the list was marketed to you, including lists described as "opt-in," "verified," "targeted," or "double opt-in" by the seller.

Verifying scraped or harvested email addresses. If you collected email addresses by scraping websites, crawling directories, mining social media profiles, extracting addresses from public records, or using any automated tool to gather email addresses without the knowledge and consent of the individuals involved, you may not use our service to verify them. This includes addresses obtained from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X, GitHub, forums, comment sections, WHOIS records, or any other publicly accessible source where the email address was not provided to you directly by its owner for the purpose of receiving your communications.

Verifying email addresses for the purpose of sending spam. You may not use ValidEmailChecker to clean or validate an email list if the intended purpose of that list is to send unsolicited commercial email. This applies regardless of the content of the email, the industry of the sender, or the perceived value of the offer. If the recipients did not ask to hear from you, cleaning the list does not make the emails any less unsolicited.

Verifying email addresses for phishing, fraud, or deception. You may not use our service to validate email addresses that will be targeted with phishing attempts, social engineering attacks, fraudulent communications, impersonation schemes, malware distribution, or any form of deceptive messaging. This prohibition is absolute and without exception.

Verifying email addresses in violation of applicable law. You may not use our service in any way that violates applicable anti-spam and data protection laws, including but not limited to Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the United States CAN-SPAM Act, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK Data Protection Act, Australia's Spam Act, and any other national or regional legislation governing electronic communications and personal data processing.

Using ValidEmailChecker to build or enhance contact databases for sale. You may not use our service to validate email addresses as part of a process to compile, enrich, supplement, or resell contact databases or email lists to third parties. Our service is for verifying your own lists for your own legitimate use — not for creating data products for distribution or sale.

4. Your Responsibilities

As a ValidEmailChecker user, you bear full responsibility for the email addresses you submit to our service and for any communications you send to those addresses after verification. Specifically, you are responsible for ensuring that every email address you verify was collected with the informed and explicit consent of the individual, or through a legitimate business relationship that permits you to process and communicate with that address. You are responsible for maintaining records of how and when consent was obtained, in case it is challenged by a recipient, a regulatory authority, or ValidEmailChecker. You are responsible for honoring all unsubscribe requests promptly and in compliance with applicable law — verifying that an email address is deliverable does not override a recipient's right to opt out. You are responsible for including accurate sender identification, a valid physical mailing address, and a clear unsubscribe mechanism in every commercial email you send, as required by CAN-SPAM, CASL, and equivalent regulations. And you are responsible for ensuring that the content of your emails complies with all applicable laws and does not contain deceptive subject lines, misleading headers, or fraudulent representations.

ValidEmailChecker verifies whether an email address is technically deliverable. We do not verify whether you have permission to email that address. That determination is entirely your responsibility.

5. How We Detect Violations

We actively monitor for patterns that indicate our service is being used in violation of this policy. While we do not read or analyze the content of the email lists you upload, we do monitor for signals that are commonly associated with spam-related activity. These signals include unusually high concentrations of spam trap addresses in a submitted list, which typically indicates the use of purchased, scraped, or aged lists. They include abnormally high rates of invalid or non-existent addresses, which often accompany lists compiled through automated harvesting. They include the creation of multiple accounts by the same individual or organization, particularly when done to exploit free credit allocations. And they include patterns of verification activity that are inconsistent with legitimate email marketing practices, such as verifying extremely large lists of addresses with no prior sending history or account activity.

When we detect these patterns, we investigate further. If our investigation confirms a violation of this policy, we take immediate action as described below.

6. Consequences of Violation

ValidEmailChecker enforces a strict zero-tolerance policy for spam-related abuse. If we determine that you have violated this Anti-Spam Policy, the consequences are immediate and permanent.

Immediate account termination. Your account will be permanently closed without prior warning. All access to the service, including the dashboard, API, and integrations, will be revoked immediately.

Forfeiture of credits. All unused credits remaining in your account at the time of termination are forfeited. This includes Pay-As-You-Go credits, monthly subscription credits, and rollover credits.

No refund. Purchases made prior to termination are non-refundable. This applies to all credit purchases, subscription payments, and Auto-Refill transactions.

Permanent ban. You will be permanently prohibited from creating a new account or using ValidEmailChecker in any capacity. We reserve the right to block associated email addresses, payment methods, and IP addresses to enforce this prohibition.

Data deletion. All data associated with your account — including uploaded email lists, verification results, and account information — will be permanently deleted in accordance with our standard data deletion procedures.

We do not offer warnings, second chances, or graduated penalties for violations of this policy. The damage caused by spam — to recipients, to the email ecosystem, and to the reputation of legitimate email senders — is too significant to tolerate even a single incident.

7. Reporting Abuse

If you believe that a ValidEmailChecker user is using our service to facilitate spam or is otherwise violating this policy, we want to hear from you. You can report suspected abuse by emailing support@validemailchecker.com with as much detail as possible, including the nature of the suspected violation, any evidence you have (such as copies of unsolicited emails with full headers), and the email address or domain involved. We investigate every abuse report and take appropriate action. Reports can be submitted anonymously.

8. Our Commitment to the Email Ecosystem

Spam degrades the email ecosystem for everyone. It fills inboxes with unwanted messages, damages the deliverability of legitimate senders, erodes consumer trust in email as a communication channel, and wastes the resources of email service providers and internet infrastructure operators. As an email verification provider, we occupy a position of responsibility within this ecosystem. We take that responsibility seriously.

Our Anti-Spam Policy is not a formality — it is a reflection of our belief that the email verification industry has an obligation to actively prevent its tools from being used to enable abuse. By enforcing strict standards, we protect the reputation of our platform, the deliverability of our legitimate users, and the integrity of the broader email ecosystem.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Anti-Spam Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, evolving anti-spam regulations, or developments in the email industry. When we make changes, we will update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page. We encourage you to review this policy periodically to ensure you remain in compliance.

10. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Anti-Spam Policy, need clarification about whether a specific use case is permitted, or want to report a suspected violation, please reach us by email at support@validemailchecker.com, or by using our contact form or live chat at any time. If you are unsure whether your intended use of our service is permitted under this policy, we strongly encourage you to contact us before proceeding. We would rather help you understand the rules than enforce them after a violation.