Acceptable use policy

Why this policy binds both of us

The Spam Act 2003 (Cth) prohibits a person from sending, or causing to be sent, a commercial electronic message with an Australian link. AussieSMS sends the text. You cause it to be sent. Both of us are covered by the same prohibition for the same message.

The Act contains one shelter for infrastructure, at section 9, and it protects a carriage service provider. AussieSMS is not a carriage service provider. It buys a normal Australian mobile service and sends from it, so that shelter does not apply. There is no version of this where a breach is only your problem, which is why these rules are conditions of using the service and not advice.

Before you send: consent

A commercial electronic message is any text where one of the purposes is to offer, advertise or promote goods, services, land or a business opportunity. One promotional sentence at the bottom of an otherwise useful text makes the whole text commercial. That is the single most common way an Australian business gets penalised, and it catches order confirmations, delivery notices and receipts that carry an offer.

You must have the recipient's consent before you send a commercial text. Consent is either express, meaning the person actively agreed, or inferred from their conduct and their business relationship with you taken together. The mere fact that a number was published somewhere is not consent.

Keep the evidence. If a complaint is made, the law puts the burden of proving consent on the person who wants to rely on it. AussieSMS holds no consent record of any kind, so if AussieSMS is asked, the only evidence in existence is yours. Record how consent was obtained, what the person was told they were agreeing to, and the date and time.

Do not treat any of the following as consent:

• A purchased, rented, scraped or swapped list.
• A pre-ticked box, or a box bundled with something else.
• A number given to you for one purpose, such as a delivery or a receipt, then used for marketing.
• A one-off purchase from years ago, or a relationship that has ended.
• A number a friend, a partner business or an affiliate gave you. Consent has to come from the person it belongs to.
• A number published on a website, unless it is a work contact, published with that person's agreement, carries no no-marketing notice, and your message is relevant to that person's actual job.

Inside the message: who you are

Every commercial text must clearly and accurately identify the business that authorised it, and must include accurate contact details for that business that stay reachable for at least 30 days after the text is sent. The business named has to be yours, not AussieSMS.

AussieSMS does not add this for you. Nothing is appended to your message. What you type is what is transmitted, so your business name and a contact point have to be in the text you write. This requirement has no exemption for factual or service messages.

Inside the message: a working unsubscribe

Every commercial text must contain a clear and conspicuous statement telling the recipient they can use an address in the message to unsubscribe, and that address must be able to receive unsubscribe requests, from that person and from everyone else who got the same message, at all times for at least 30 days after the text was sent. It must not cost the recipient more than a normal message of that kind, must not require a payment, and must not require them to create an account or log in.

Read this part carefully, because it is the specific way this product can put you in breach. Your text is sent from a real Australian mobile and the recipient can reply to it. Those replies arrive on the handset. They are not delivered to your AussieSMS dashboard, they are not forwarded to you, and nobody reads them on your behalf. So a message that says "reply STOP to opt out" is telling the truth about the technology and a lie about the outcome, and the outcome is the part the law tests. Do not use it.

Give an unsubscribe route you personally control and actually monitor. A phone number you answer, an email address you read, or a short link to a page on your own site all work. Whatever you choose has to keep working for the full 30 days.

After the message: honouring an opt-out

When someone tells you they do not want any more commercial messages, their consent stops applying at the end of the fifth business day after they told you. From that moment, every further commercial text to that person is a fresh contravention in its own right. Business days exclude weekends and public holidays where the message was sent.

AussieSMS does not maintain a suppression list. There is no field to mark a number as opted out and no check that would stop a send to one. If you remove an opted-out number from your own records and it is still in the next file you upload, the message goes. Keep your own list, and clean it before every send.

What you must not send

• Anything designed to deceive a person into handing over money, property or credentials. Phishing, fake delivery notices, fake bank or toll notices, investment and cryptocurrency lures.
• A message that impersonates another business, a government body, a bank or a person, or that misrepresents who sent it.
• Messages to a list built with address-harvesting software, or to any list you did not lawfully obtain.
• Messages to numbers you have reason to believe are not real, including sending across a numeric range to see what connects.
• Malware, or links to malware, credential-harvesting pages, or content that is unlawful to distribute in Australia.
• Harassment, threats, abuse, stalking, or repeated unwanted contact with an individual.
• Marketing for a third party the recipient has no relationship with, including reselling your access or sending on behalf of another business, unless you have that business named in the message as required above and consent for every recipient.
• One-time passcodes, banking codes, or any security or identity verification factor. This service hands a message to a carrier and normally never learns whether it arrived, so it must not be relied on where a missed message locks someone out or lets an attacker in.
• Anything time-critical to a person's safety. This is not an emergency, medical alert or duress channel, and it must not be built into one.

Volume, testing and other people's numbers

Test with your own number. Sending a test to a number you do not control is a commercial electronic message like any other and carries every obligation on this page. In documentation and examples, +61400000000 is used deliberately because it is a reserved number that reaches nobody.

Messages leave through a single Australian mobile service shared by every account. Volume that a carrier treats as abnormal can interrupt sending for other customers, so a large campaign is a conversation to have with us first rather than a thing to discover together.

What AussieSMS does and does not do about this

AussieSMS does not read, filter, scan or moderate your messages before they are sent. There is no keyword blocklist, no automated content check and no approval step. Your message is validated for shape, charged, queued and transmitted.

This means this policy is a rule, not a mechanism. Nothing on the platform will stop you breaking it. If AussieSMS learns of a breach, from a recipient, from a carrier or from a regulator, it may hold or refuse queued messages, suspend or close the account, and it must respond truthfully to a regulator about what was sent and by whom.

If an account is closed, credits that have not been spent stay yours. Email support@nearme-ads.com and they will be refunded.

Reporting a message you received

If you received a text you did not consent to and it came from a number operated by this service, email support@nearme-ads.com with the number it came from, the date and the wording. That complaint will be acted on against the account that sent it.

Complaints about spam can also be made to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates the Spam Act and publishes its guidance for senders.

ACMA guidance on consent, sender identification and unsubscribe

Related pages

This policy forms part of the service terms. How AussieSMS handles the personal information in your account and in your recipient lists, including where in the world it is stored, is set out in the privacy policy.