WarHorse — Organize. Mobilize. Win.
Acceptable use & anti-spam policy · last updated 6 September 2026

Email that people asked for.
Nothing else.

Every organization on WarHorse sends from shared infrastructure, so one bad list hurts everyone. These are the rules, and most of them are enforced by the software before a message can leave, not by a policy someone reads afterwards.

Who this applies to

Every organization that sends email through WarHorse — political campaigns, riding associations, charities, advocacy groups — and Housewives & Co. itself when we send from this site. It applies to campaign blasts, automated journeys, and one-to-one replies alike. It is part of every client agreement.

You may send to a person only if one of these is true, and the platform records which one applied to each message:

  • They expressly asked. They ticked a box that was unchecked when the page loaded, and the wording they saw is on record. Express consent does not expire. A client that sells nothing may instead collect consent with a notice under its forms' button; the platform records that as its own kind of consent, and it never carries a commercial message.
  • They have an existing relationship with you as defined by Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation — they donated, bought, volunteered, or asked you something recently. Implied consent of this kind expires, and the platform tracks the date.
  • The message is one the law exempts — for a registered political party, candidate or riding association, a message whose primary purpose is soliciting a contribution; or a message that is not commercial at all. Each message is classified before it is sent, and a message is not exempt just because the sender is.

The burden of proving consent is on the sender under Canadian law. That is why the platform keeps an append-only record per person of how consent was obtained, and stamps every individual message with the basis it relied on.

What is never allowed

Purchased, rented, traded or scraped lists. A list of addresses you did not collect yourself, from people who did not ask you for anything, cannot be imported. There is no exception for "industry lists" or "compiled voter files".
Importing a list without a record of consent. An import must say, per address, how and when that person consented. An import that cannot is refused.
Misleading senders and subjects. The From name must be the organization actually sending. The subject must describe the message.
Removing the footer. The sender identification, mailing address and unsubscribe link are mandatory and cannot be edited out in the composer.
Continuing to send after an unsubscribe, a hard bounce, or a spam complaint. The platform enforces this; attempting to work around it is a breach.

Every message must carry

  1. The name of the organization sending it, and its physical mailing address.
  2. A way to contact the sender — an email address, a web address, or a phone number.
  3. An unsubscribe link in the footer that works at no cost to the recipient, and stays valid for at least 60 days.
  4. A one-click unsubscribe header (RFC 8058), which Gmail, Yahoo and others surface as a button.

A message missing any of these is refused at send time. It does not go out with a warning; it does not go out.

Unsubscribes

An unsubscribe takes effect immediately — well inside the ten business days the law allows and the two days the major mailbox providers require. It follows the person, not just the address: correcting someone's email does not put them back on a list they left. Unsubscribe requests are recorded and cannot be deleted.

Bounces and complaints

Delivery, bounce and complaint notifications come back from Amazon Web Services for every message. A hard bounce — the address does not exist — or a spam complaint suppresses that address permanently for that organization. Suppressions are derived records and are never deleted, so a bad address cannot quietly come back.

We monitor complaint rates. An organization whose complaint rate approaches one in a thousand is paused and contacted before mailbox providers act, because at that rate they will.

What the software enforces

Most of this policy is code, not trust. Before a campaign can launch, the platform checks that the sender is declared and its domain verified, that the message carries the mandatory footer, that an unsubscribe mechanism is present and resolves, that every recipient is eligible under the message's class, and that the organization is inside its plan's sending allowance. Every launch seals a snapshot of what was sent, to whom, and on what basis. Automated journeys pass the same checks per message.

The platform does not embed open-tracking pixels. We know when a message was delivered, bounced or complained about; we do not know whether it was opened.

What we do when a list is bad

If an organization breaches this policy — a bought list, a stripped footer, complaints above the threshold — we pause their sending, tell them why, and work with them to fix it. Repeated or deliberate breaches end the relationship. Because every organization sends through the same infrastructure, we will always protect the many from the one.

Reporting abuse

If you received a message through WarHorse that you did not ask for, or that you believe breaks these rules, write to hello@warhorseapp.com with the message attached. We can identify the sending organization and the consent record behind any message we delivered, and we will act on it.

Related: Privacy policy.