Acceptable Use Policy

1. Scope

This policy applies to everyone who uses MailerDot — readers, anyone submitting an event, and Operators who lease a city. It forms part of the Terms of Service and expands on Terms §5 and §10. Breaching it is a material breach of those Terms.

2. What MailerDot sells

MailerDot publishes a free automated daily email digest of local news, weather, and events for U.S. cities, with a public web archive. Readers pay nothing and are never sold anything.

There are exactly three paid products. The first is a monthly software subscription that leases the commercial rights to one city. It is billed month to month, it is delivered entirely as software — an operator console with a permanent spotlight placement, a town inbox, aggregate reporting, and a 50% share of net listing revenue for that city — and it can be cancelled from the dashboard at any time. Pricing is published at /for-operators.

The second is an event listing: a flat-priced, one-time purchase that puts a local event on a city's public Events page — and, at the higher price, inside its daily editions — until the day of the event. Prices are published at /advertise. Every listing is screened against §4 before payment is taken, and a rejected submission is never charged. Listings are sold by MailerDot only, at published prices only; an Operator may not sell, approve, or charge for one.

The third is a business directory listing: a flat-priced, one-time purchase that puts a local business on a city's public Directory page for thirty days — and, at the higher price, adds one mention a week inside its daily editions across that run. Prices are published at /advertise. The same rules apply in full: screened against §4 before payment, never charged when rejected, sold by MailerDot only at published prices only.

Alongside the paid products, standard listings are free: anyone may submit an event or business listing at no charge. Free submissions enter a human review queue with no committed timeline and no guarantee of listing; the §4 standards apply to them in full, approved ones run below premium placements and never in the daily editions, and nothing about a free listing is sold, charged, or shared with anyone.

What it is deliberately not

• Not a franchise or a business opportunity. The subscription is $10/month per city for its first 1,000 subscribers, plus $5/month per additional 1,000, month to month, cancellable from the dashboard. There is no joining fee, territory fee, royalty, or minimum term. The listing revenue share is a fixed contractual percentage of sales MailerDot itself makes — not a scheme, not a downline, and not something anyone recruits into — and we make no representation, promise, or projection about what a Territory will sell or earn — not on this site, not in any email, not at any price. A lease is not a franchise, partnership, joint venture, agency, security, or investment contract; Terms §7 says so in those words.
• Not a marketplace and not an ad exchange. We sell our own three products and nothing else. We do not resell, host, or take a commission on any third party's product, and an Operator may not resell their placement or sell a listing either. The only paid placements in an edition are the ones described above, bought from MailerDot at the published flat prices, screened by MailerDot, and labelled as paid.
• Not a list broker or bulk-email tool. Subscriber addresses are never sold, exported, shared, or shown to anyone. There is no export feature to disable — the reporting queries hold no email column. Operators cannot import a list either.
• No physical goods, no shipping, no fulfilment. Nothing is ever mailed to anyone.
• No regulated or high-risk offering. We do not sell or facilitate gambling, lending, financial or insurance products, crypto or NFT assets, adult content, pharmaceuticals or supplements, weapons, tobacco or vaping, telemarketing, debt relief, MLM or income-opportunity schemes, or any licensed profession's services.

3. Everyone

You may not use MailerDot to:

• Break any law, or any anti-spam, privacy, consumer-protection, or advertising rule.
• Subscribe an address you do not own or have permission to use.
• Scrape, harvest, or systematically extract content or subscriber data, or attempt to re-identify individual subscribers from aggregate figures.
• Probe, overload, or interfere with the service, its infrastructure, or its sending reputation.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation with MailerDot, a city, or a publication.
• Republish edition content commercially without permission, or present it as your own.

4. What may run in an edition

Nothing publishes itself. Review is not a policy we intend to follow, it is how the system is built — a purchased listing is screened before its checkout exists, an Operator's spotlight copy waits in a review queue, and only what has passed is ever rendered into an edition. Unreviewed copy runs nowhere.

MailerDot screens every listing and can remove anything at any time, including a listing already paid for and published — editions go out under our name, so the call is ours alone. The city's Operator does not review, approve, or remove listings, and cannot be paid to. Spotlight copy is reviewed by us. What a removal means for the money is in the Refund Policy §8.

Whoever buys or submits something warrants that it is truthful, not misleading, compliant with the FTC Act and all applicable advertising and disclosure rules, and that they hold every right needed to publish it.

An event listing must additionally be

• A real, specific, local event with a date — not a business's opening hours, an ongoing promotion, a permanent service, or a sale.
• Open to the public, or clearly stating who it is for.
• Bought by someone entitled to publicise it. Don't list other people's events with your own link attached.
• Free of pricing pressure, countdowns, and sales copy. Say what it is, where, and when — the listing is the promotion; the copy doesn't have to shout.

These standards are exactly what the automated screen enforces, before any payment: a submission that fails them is declined and never charged, one the screen cannot decide waits for a human, and repeat attempts to push what was declined will have the buyer blocked.

Nothing in an edition may promote or contain

• Anything unlawful, deceptive, or fraudulent — including phishing, malware, misrepresented offers, fake countdowns, or fake scarcity.
• Adult or sexually oriented content of any kind, dating services, or escort services.
• Gambling, betting, sweepstakes, lotteries, or pay-to-play auctions.
• Weapons, ammunition, explosives, tobacco, vaping, alcohol sold direct, illicit drugs, or CBD.
• Regulated financial offerings — loans, lending, debt relief, credit repair, mortgages, investment or insurance products, currency exchange, crypto assets, or NFTs.
• Pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, supplements, or any health, weight-loss, or cure claim.
• Multi-level marketing, business-in-a-box, work-from-home, or get-rich-quick offers.
• Metaphysical or spiritual-outcome services, fortune telling, or psychic services.
• Counterfeit goods, pirated media, cracked software, essay mills, or anything you do not hold the rights to.
• Political, electoral, or issue advocacy.
• Unsubstantiated claims about health, safety, earnings, or legal outcomes.
• Content that disparages, targets, or discriminates against any person or protected group.

This list mirrors what our payment providers refuse to process. It is not exhaustive — we may reject anything for any reason. A listing declined at screening was never charged; what a later removal means for its fee is in the Refund Policy §8.

Subscriber data

Operators lease an audience; they do not buy a list. No export, no addresses, no lookups, and no importing an outside list into the service. This is the one rule with no exception and no waiver, and breaching it ends a lease immediately without refund. See Terms §9 and Privacy §4.

5. AI-generated content

Editions are written by a large language model grounded in web search, and are not reviewed by a human editor before sending. Every edition and archive page says so. AI summaries can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong; verify anything that matters with the original source.

The shape of that generation is narrow, on purpose:

• Text only. MailerDot does not generate images, video, audio, or voice, and provides no face-swap, deepfake, avatar, or likeness tool of any kind. Photography on the site is licensed stock, credited in Terms §14.
• No user prompt steers the writing. Edition generation runs on a fixed daily schedule from a fixed template over public local sources. There is no chat interface, no prompt box, and no way for a reader, Operator, or buyer to steer, jailbreak, or publish through the model.
• Listing submissions are screened by AI, and we say so. The text of a purchased event listing is read by an automated compliance check against §4 before payment, with human review where the check cannot decide. The submission is treated strictly as content under review — it cannot instruct the model, and the check's only output is a verdict. Nothing the screen approves publishes until payment clears.
• Not a general-purpose AI service. Model access is not resold, proxied, or exposed as an API. What is published is a local news digest, and nothing else.
• No personal data goes into it. Subscriber addresses and reader behaviour are never sent to the model or used to personalise an edition. Every reader in a city receives the same edition.

Editions are not corrected or re-sent — an edition records what its sources said that morning. If one is inaccurate, defamatory, or infringes your rights, tell us and we will review it promptly and may remove the archived copy.

6. Reporting a violation

Report a listing, a spotlight, an edition, or an Operator to legal@mailerdot.com. Include the city, the date of the edition, and what is wrong with it. We acknowledge every report within 3 business days. For billing and account questions, use our support contact form.

7. What we do about it

Depending on what we find we may reject or pull a placement, remove an archived edition, suspend an Operator's console access, or terminate a lease. A termination for breach of this policy takes effect immediately and no refund is due — see the Refund & Cancellation Policy. Where the law requires it, we report to the relevant authority.

We enforce this policy at our discretion, and not enforcing it once does not waive it.