Anti-Abuse Policy

The short version

NeedlePool is sending software for music promo. Two kinds of address go through it: the sender's own contacts, and our shared pool of DJs, radio shows, curators and labels who publish an address for exactly this purpose. Neither is bought, and neither is scraped from places that were not offering to receive music. Every email carries a working unsubscribe, every unsubscribe is permanent — from one artist or from everyone, as the recipient chooses — and a campaign that starts annoying people is stopped by the system before the sender notices.

Report anything that looks like abuse to [email protected]. You do not need an account to write, and you do not need to be the recipient.

Who may be emailed

• Your own contacts. Lists you import stay yours, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to contact them — that is a condition of the Terms, not a suggestion.
• Our shared pool. Addresses published for receiving promo: submission pages, demo inboxes, public directories, podcast feeds. We record where each one was found. Where it came from is written in the Privacy Policy, and every email we send says it in the footer as well.
• People who asked us directly. Curators can sign up for promo in their genres and confirm by email before anything is sent.

Purchased, scraped, guessed or harvested addresses are not allowed, and neither are lists of people who never published an address for music. An account found using them is closed.

Unsubscribing, and why it holds

• Every email has an unsubscribe link, and the standard one-click header (RFC 8058) so the mail app can show its own button.
• Unsubscribing from a promo stops that artist by default — the email's own link and the mail app's one-click button both do this, and no later campaign by that artist can reach the address. The same page offers a second choice, never get promos from any artist on NeedlePool: the address goes on a suppression list that covers the whole service, and no later campaign by anyone can reach it.
• Our own emails — invitations to join NeedlePool — let you choose: stop only those, or everything. Stopping only the invitations keeps the promos artists send you; stopping everything works as above.
• The suppression list is permanent — it is the one record that survives a request to erase everything else, because without it we would have no way of knowing not to write again.
• The list is checked twice: when the recipients are gathered, and again in the moment of sending. A person who unsubscribes while a campaign is running does not get the rest of it.

Automatic stops

Limits are enforced by the sending engine, not by asking senders to behave. A campaign is judged from twenty deliveries onward and stopped on its own when:

• hard bounces pass 6.5% — above that, mail providers read a send as a purchased list;
• unsubscribes pass 3% — people are saying the targeting is wrong;
• bounces pass 30% — stopped immediately, whatever else is true.

Stopping is the default, not a warning: the remaining recipients are never sent to, and the sender gets the numbers and the first failing addresses. Volume per plan is capped as well, and a send stops at the cap instead of quietly charging for extra.

What we do not do

• We do not sell, rent or export contact data. The pool is not a product you can download; senders never see a pool member's address.
• We do not send on our own behalf to a sender's list, and we do not use imported contacts for anything but that sender's campaigns.
• We do not promise plays, downloads, playlist adds or signings, and we do not sell engagement of any kind — see the Refund Policy.
• We do not send bulk mail without a working unsubscribe, and there is no setting that removes it.

Music you send

A sender uploads their own recordings, or ones they are authorised to promote. NeedlePool is not file storage and not a way to pass a catalogue around: audio reaches only the recipients of a campaign, through links tied to that recipient, and it goes away with the campaign. Rights holders can write to [email protected] — the files come down and the campaign carrying them stops, on the same terms as any other abuse report.

Reporting abuse

Write to [email protected] with the email you received — full headers help, but are not required. We answer within two business days. If the complaint is about an address, it goes on the suppression list the same day, before any investigation: stopping the mail is not conditional on us agreeing with you.

Repeat complaints against one account end it, and the sending stops with it. For anything that is not an abuse report, write to [email protected].