Pony
ACCEPTABLE USE

What will get you cut off

Last updated 12 August 2026
IN SHORT

Reputation is the only thing standing between a good sender and a poisoned one, and it is shared: your complaints land on the same infrastructure as every other sender’s mail. Senders are cut off automatically when complaints or bounces climb. This page is the rule those cut-offs enforce, published before they happen rather than after.

Who this binds

Anyone who sends through Pony, and anything sent with a key issued under your account. An agent acting on your behalf is you: if you deployed it or handed it a key, its sends are your sends and this policy applies to them.

Transactional mail only

Pony is a transactional send API. Send messages a recipient asked for and is expecting: receipts, alerts, password resets, notifications, one-to-one replies.

Do not use it for:

  • bulk marketing, newsletters or campaigns;
  • cold outreach, prospecting or anything sent to a purchased, scraped or rented list;
  • mail to addresses that did not ask you for it — consent given to someone else, or inherited with a list, is not consent.

Content that is never allowed

  • phishing, credential harvesting, or any message designed to be mistaken for another service — including a message designed to be mistaken for Pony;
  • impersonating a person, company or brand you are not authorised to send as;
  • fraud and financial deception of any kind, including fake invoices, advance-fee schemes, and cryptocurrency giveaway, airdrop or wallet-recovery scams;
  • malware, ransomware, or links leading to either;
  • content that is illegal where it is sent or received, sexual content involving children, or material that promotes violence or harassment against people;
  • anything sent to threaten, stalk or intimidate a person.

Conduct that is never allowed

  • forging headers, or sending from a domain or address you do not control and have not verified with us;
  • reselling capacity, or sharing a key so that a third party sends under your identity;
  • spreading volume across several accounts or domains to get past a rate limit that applies to one;
  • opening a new account to carry on after a suspension — a fresh payment does not clear a prior enforcement, and we will end the new account too;
  • probing, load testing or attacking the API, or using it to attack anyone else;
  • sending to addresses that have already bounced hard, or that have complained about you.

The limits we measure, and act on without asking

You send from a domain you own and have verified with us, which is the point at which you have something of your own at stake. Beyond that, the limits are enforced by the system rather than by judgement:

  • A complaint-rate kill switch. Complaint rate is measured per sending domain from its first send. A domain that crosses [COMPLAINT RATE THRESHOLD] over a rolling window is suspended automatically, and stays suspended until a person reviews it.
  • A bounce-rate limit. Sustained hard bounces above [BOUNCE RATE THRESHOLD] read as a list you did not collect yourself, and suspend the domain the same way.
  • A daily cap where the plan states one, applied per calendar day in UTC.

These thresholds protect every other sender on the platform, so they are applied to measurements, not to intentions. A domain can be suspended for crossing one of them without anyone having decided you did something wrong.

What enforcement looks like

Depending on what is happening and how much harm it is doing, we may suspend a sending domain, revoke an API key, refuse further payment, or end an account entirely. Where mail is going out and doing damage, we act first and explain afterwards.

Suspension for a breach of this policy does not entitle you to a refund of the plan you bought. The refunds page says exactly what we will and will not consider, and what happens if you raise a chargeback instead.

Sanctions and the law

You may not use Pony if you are located in, ordinarily resident in, or acting for anyone in a country or territory subject to comprehensive trade sanctions, or if you or anyone you are sending for appears on a sanctions list that applies to us. We may refuse or return a payment we believe is subject to one, and may be required to report it.

Reporting abuse

If you received mail from Pony that breaks this policy, write to [ABUSE EMAIL ADDRESS] with the full message headers. Headers identify the sending domain, which is what lets us act on the right one.

Changes

We update this policy as we learn what abuse looks like on this platform, and the current version is the one that applies. It forms part of the terms of service, which are between you and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME].