What are my rights and responsibilities as an Advantex LLC hosting customer?  What are the rights and responsibilities of Advantex LLC?

These questions and more are covered in our TERMS OF SERVICE agreement, which becomes effective as soon as you become a paying hosting customer.  This agreement may be updated from time to time; please check back often.  Other policies are outlined on this page, as well.

You will need the free Adobe Reader software installed on your machine in order to view our Terms of Service document; please visit www.adobe.com for more information.

 

What are your outbound mail policies?

Simply stated, you must not be a spammer, and determining that is solely at our discretion.  Some of the general criteria we use:

• How many people are you sending to?  We track the number of messages going out from any given domain in a given month.  If usage is way out of line for your account, you may be asked to use a dedicated mail server, set up and paid for at your expense.  We have custom-built newsletter/email servers available for regular marketing campaigns.
  
  
• Have those recipients specifically opted-in to receive your message(s)?  Were the recipients asked to "place a check in a checkbox" or otherwise tell you specifically that they wish to be contacted by you?
  
  
• How old is your list of addresses?  Has it ever been used?  Has it ever been cleaned?
  
  
• Where was your list of email addresses obtained?  If not from your own website, chances are good we will decline your request to send to that list.
  
  
• What is the content of your message?  Is it HTML, text, or both?  Does it contain any attachments?
  
  
• Does your message/broadcast meet all the requirements of the CAN-SPAM act?

 

What are the consequences of abusing the mail system?

We reserve the right to shut down EVERY aspect of your account with zero refunds - DNS, website, email services, ezmlm/listserv - and/or levarage steep account fees/fines if you are found to be in violation of these terms.  To put it simply, work WITH us to ensure that you are following policy and being a good "netizen", or risk the wholesale shutdown of your online presence.   YES, we take this seriously.

 

What are the SPAM filtering policies and procedures with regards to incoming mail?

Advantex LLC has taken great care and invested a great deal of time and energy towards preventing SPAM from reaching your inbox.  Our policies are as follows:

• We use subject line modification to determine what messages will reach your inbox.  For example, messages can be marked as [spam?], [spam!], [blocked], and other such modifiers by our advanced spam filtering system, and we use those modifiers to determine what messages reach your inbox, are redirected to your "spam" mailbox, or are never shown.  The system is fully customizable with regards to what reaches your mailbox -- [spam?] messages can be set to come down to your mail program or be stored in an online spam folder for later cleaning.  Advanced customization is also available, but our default configuration so far has worked well for 100% of our clients!
  
• If a message comes in from a sender/IP that is on a single blacklist, it is stamped as [spam?] in the subject line of the message.  We cannot bypass this feature (because of the high level of accuracy), but we can whitelist certain sender email addresses for you (or show you how to do it yourself) so that the message still comes to you instead of being trapped in your spam box.
  
  
• If a message comes from a sender or IP that is on TWO OR MORE blacklists, our policy is that the message will never be seen.  THERE WILL BE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE.  We do not permit heavily blacklisted senders from reaching our clients.  Senders on two more more blacklists are certainly having difficulty getting their messages out to many other destinations as well, and must take action to correct the situation in order to reach our clients.
  
  
• In addition to using blacklists to determine what we should do with a message, we also use an advanced content analysis system to determine whether a message is spam.  This content analysis system is updated every few HOURS, meaning that we can filter for the very latest SPAM.  Messages from one blacklist that also contain spam-like content are never seen.  We have many different options to deal with false positives created by our content analysis system. 
  
  

How can I notify Advantex LLC regarding a message being improperly marked as spam ("false positive")?

We can analyze the message for you as long as you send the message to us using the exact procedure below.  We will fine tune the system as much as possible to prevent future false positives from that sender, so long as the sender's outgoing mail server  is not on two or more blacklists.

To notify us of a false positive:

• Using your mail program on your machine, start a new message, to notspam (at) advantex (dot) net.
  
  
• Drag and drop the false positive message into the new message and send.  Include no other information in your message.
  
  
• If you are using Webmail exclusively, forward the message to notspam (at) advantex (dot) net.
  
  
• You must report a false positive within three days of receipt; after three days, our archive mailbox and log files will have been fully archived, making retrieving additional information about the message much more difficult.

IF YOU ARE REPLYING TO A MESSAGE WITH [SPAM?] IN THE SUBJECT LINE, REMOVE THE INDICATOR BEFORE SENDING.  If that indicator remains in the subject line, it will continue to be caught by your spam filter when the person replies, even if they are no longer being trapped for any other reason.