1. Emailing your clients
The service can send email to your clients, including to your whole client list at once when a season opens. That mail is sent from your firm's own mailbox and your firm is the sender in law.
Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) governs commercial electronic messages sent to Canadian addresses. Penalties are significant and they fall on the sender. By using these features you confirm that:
- You have consent — express or implied — to email every address on the list, and you can evidence it if asked.
- An existing client relationship gives you implied consent for a limited period, and you understand that period ends.
- Every message identifies your firm and gives a working way to unsubscribe or to reach a person.
- You will act on an unsubscribe request within 10 business days, as CASL requires.
- You will not use the service to email people who are not your clients or prospects — no purchased lists, no scraped addresses.
2. What the software does not do for you
It is worth being blunt about this, because assuming otherwise is the most likely way for a firm to get into trouble.
The service sends the messages you tell it to send. It does not verify that you have consent, does not maintain a suppression list on your behalf, and does not decide whether a message is commercial. Those are your firm's judgements and your firm's records.
What it does do is show you the count before a bulk send, including the clients it cannot reach, so that no message goes out without somebody having seen how many there are.
3. Reputation
Because each firm sends through its own mailbox, one firm's sending practices affect only that firm's deliverability. That is deliberate.
We may still suspend the sending features of an account generating bounce or complaint rates that suggest a list problem, and we will tell you why. Continuing to send to a list that is producing complaints harms your firm before it harms anyone else.
4. What you must not put in the service
The service is for the records of a Canadian personal tax practice. You must not use it to store:
- Personal information you have no lawful basis to hold.
- Payment card numbers. The service is not built for them and storing them here would put your firm outside the card industry's rules.
- Anything unlawful, or material you have no right to hold.
5. What you must not do to the service
- Attempt to reach another firm's data, or to test the security of the service without our written permission.
- Interfere with the service's availability for other firms — automated traffic at a volume a practice would not generate, deliberate resource exhaustion, or anything similar.
- Upload malware, or use the client-facing upload pages as a way to distribute files to third parties.
- Circumvent a limit on your plan, or share one login between people.
6. If something goes wrong
Where we can, we will tell you about a problem and give you a chance to fix it before we do anything about it. Where a use threatens the security or availability of the service for other firms, we may act first and explain immediately afterwards.
Report abuse of the service, or a security problem you have found, to [contact email]. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine security issue to us in good faith and gives us a reasonable chance to fix it before disclosing it.