Anti-spam Policy

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We work hard to prevent spam and the misuse of personal data and deal with all suspicious activity accordingly. Please keep in mind, by creating a Samba account, you not only agree to our Terms and Conditions, but also with our anti-spam policies.

While that’s our broadly-stated policy, the concept of permission can be interpreted in different ways so let’s go over a few specific guidelines to clarify what is and what is not permitted.

General Permission

In general, you can only send business-related emails to those who have given you explicit permission to do so.

Approved Means of Gathering Email Addresses

• Via a form (i.e. lightbox) on your site, which is filled in by the user and is explicit in its intention of opting them into subscribing to an email list.
• The form must include an opt-in checkbox that in no case can be pre-filled. The person completing the form must tick the box at will, giving consent to being contacted in the future.
• If a user completes an offline form (such as a survey) or is participating in a marketing contest, you can only contact him if he has been informed in advance that you will contact him via email.
• You’re allowed to contact customers who have purchased something in the last two years without explicit consent, as long as they’ve willingly given their email address.
• If someone gives you their business card and you request their explicit permission, you can add it to your contact list.
• A basic rule of thumb: Only send emails to people who have given you explicit permission to contact them.

What Is Not Allowed

Any email addresses collected by a means other than what’s outlined above are not allowed to be used for email marketing purposes. However, there are a few grey areas or situations where consent seems explicit but actually isn’t.

By using Samba, you agree not to import or send emails to addresses in the following cases:

• When the email addresses are provided by a third party. Regardless of what the third party claims about the recipient’s consent, you must always obtain the consent of the recipient yourself.
• When you haven’t contacted a person over the last two years. Permission has a certain lifespan.
• When you’ve received the contact information from the web. Posting an email address does not necessarily mean that that person is giving you explicit consent to add them as an email subscriber.

Our Monitoring Process

To ensure that you comply with our anti-spam policy, we use a multi-stage approval and monitoring process in Samba:

1. After uploading an external email database, it will be manually checked by our team. You will not be able to send emails to this database until this process is completed.
2. Our software is directly linked to spam reporting systems for some of the largest ISPs and will immediately know if and when a person you haven’t received permission from identifies your email as spam.
3. If your spam complaint rate is greater than 0.2% (i.e. 20 complaints per 10,000 recipients), we’ll automatically block additional emails and contact you. Other services (e.g. personalization) will not be affected.
4. We regularly monitor blacklists and senders who have been flagged for abuse.

In general, if the recipient doesn’t know who you are or aren’t interested in the content of your messages or you haven’t contacted them in a while, there’s a high chance your email will be identified as spam.

If you have any questions about our antispam policy or would like to report spam, please contact us.

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