Acceptable Use Policy

Consent, restated

Only message people who gave your business permission to text them, and keep the proof. Purchased, rented, scraped, appended, or inherited lists are not permitted, whatever the seller claimed. Consent given to a company you acquired transfers only if the original opt-in covered it.

Opt-out

STOP, STOP ALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT and OPTOUT are honoured automatically, along with plainer phrasings like "please stop". We suppress the number for your account immediately. Do not try to work around a suppression by re-uploading the number, sending from a second account, or asking the recipient to opt back in by text.

Timing

Campaign messages are held outside 8am-9pm in the recipient's local time, inferred from the number. Do not attempt to defeat this.

Content that is never allowed

• Phishing, spoofing, or impersonating another business, person, or public body.
• Malware, or links to it.
• Fraud of any kind, including "wrong number" openers, fake delivery notices, fake bank alerts, and investment or crypto solicitations of the kind that begin as a stranger's friendly text.
• Threats, harassment, or hate speech.
• Sexually explicit content, and any content involving minors.
• Illegal goods and services, and anything you are not licensed to sell.
• Deceptive framing - a promotional message disguised as a transactional one, a sender name that is not your business, or an offer whose terms are not what the recipient will get.

Content that needs care

Some categories are restricted or filtered by US carriers regardless of consent - lending and debt relief, gambling, firearms, tobacco and vape, cannabis and CBD, adult content, cryptocurrency, and "get rich quick" offers among them. If your business is in one of these, talk to us before you launch. We would rather set expectations than watch a campaign get blocked mid-send.

Messages about health, finances, or anything else a person would consider private: send them only where the recipient asked for that specifically, and keep the content minimal.

Technical conduct

No probing or load-testing the platform, no circumventing rate limits, no distributing one campaign across several accounts to dilute complaint rates, and no using smskick to send one-time passcodes or account-security codes unless we have agreed to it in writing.

How this is enforced

We watch opt-out rates and complaint signals per account and per sending number. A sharp rise usually means a list was not what it was said to be, and we will pause sending and ask. Depending on what we find: a warning, a pause, a permanent suspension, or a report to the carrier. A first serious breach of the consent rules ends the account.

Something wrong, on our platform or from someone using it? Tell us at abuse@smskick.com.