Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") is part of the Terms of Service and governs how you may use BriefGate to contact people — your clients — who never agreed to any BriefGate contract. It exists because that is not a theoretical risk: when BriefGate sends a chase email through Resend or an SMS through Twilio on your behalf, Resend and Twilio hold BriefGate responsible for that traffic, and a pattern of spam complaints or a provider compliance flag against BriefGate's sending infrastructure puts every customer's deliverability at risk, not just yours. This policy is how that responsibility is passed down to the account that actually wrote the message and chose the recipient.

If there is a conflict between this AUP and the Terms of Service, the Terms govern (see their order-of-precedence clause).

1. You need your own lawful basis to contact your client

BriefGate is a delivery and chasing mechanism. It has no relationship with your client and no way to know whether you are entitled to email or text them. You are solely responsible for having your own lawful basis — under GDPR, Czech law, CAN-SPAM, TCPA, or whatever regime applies to you and your recipient — for every address and phone number you put into an intake. In practice this means, at minimum:

• You have an existing relationship with the person (they are your client, or someone who asked you for the quote/project the intake relates to).
• You are not purchasing, scraping, or otherwise acquiring contact lists to push through BriefGate's chase engine.
• Where SMS is involved, you have consent to text that number where consent is legally required to do so.

BriefGate is not a party to your engagement with your client and does not review individual intakes before they are sent. That review, when it happens, happens after the fact — from bounce/complaint signals (§3) or a provider flag — which is why this obligation sits with you up front rather than with us as a gate.

2. What you may not do with an intake

Regardless of your lawful basis to contact someone, you may not use BriefGate to:

• Send unsolicited bulk messages, or any message a reasonable recipient would call spam.
• Contact someone who has unsubscribed, bounced, or asked you to stop — the chase engine already stops on a hard bounce or spam complaint (see the chase docs); manually working around that stop is a breach of this policy.
• Impersonate another person or organization, or misrepresent who is asking for the material.
• Send content that is illegal, fraudulent, defamatory, harassing, or that facilitates any of those.
• Distribute malware, phishing links, or content designed to compromise a recipient's device or accounts, through any item type.
• Use a secret or file/file_list/image item to collect data that is unrelated to the stated project the intake is for. Item labels and help text must accurately describe what is being collected and why; a "secret" item is for the credentials a project actually needs, not a general-purpose data-collection field, and a file item is for project deliverables, not an unrelated document drop.
• Use the service to violate any applicable law, including data protection, anti-spam, and telecommunications law in your jurisdiction or your recipient's.
• Attempt to circumvent BriefGate's rate limits, plan limits, or abuse detection.

3. Bounces, complaints, and provider flags

BriefGate monitors delivery signals from Resend and Twilio, including hard bounces, spam complaints, and compliance flags raised by either provider against your sending activity. When one of these occurs:

• The chase engine automatically stops sending to a bounced or complaint-flagged address on the affected intake (see the chase docs).
• A pattern across multiple intakes or recipients, or a compliance flag raised by Resend or Twilio themselves against your account's traffic, is treated as evidence of a policy breach and reviewed by BriefGate, whether or not any single message looks clearly abusive in isolation — providers flag accounts on aggregate signals, and BriefGate has to respond at the same level to keep sending working for every customer.

4. Suspension and termination

BriefGate may, at its discretion and proportionate to the issue:

• Suspend chase sending (email and/or SMS) on a specific intake, without suspending the rest of your account, where the signal is isolated to that intake.
• Suspend an entire account's sending capability or access where the issue is account-wide, repeated, or where a provider (Resend or Twilio) has flagged the account itself rather than one intake.
• Terminate the account for a material or repeated breach of this policy, under the termination provisions of the Terms of Service.

Where the risk is a live compliance flag from Resend or Twilio threatening BriefGate's own sending reputation, we may act immediately and notify you afterward, rather than waiting for a cure period — the alternative is other customers' mail and SMS being throttled or blocked because of one account's traffic. For anything short of that, we will tell you what triggered the review and give you a chance to explain or fix it before suspending.

Suspension for a policy breach does not entitle you to a refund for the suspended period, and does not pause billing — see the Terms of Service on the customer's own chase content and recipients being outside BriefGate's liability.

5. Reporting abuse

If you receive a chase email or SMS from a BriefGate customer that you believe breaches this policy — an unwanted message, a suspicious link, or a message unrelated to any project you agreed to — you can report it to [email protected]. Reports involving personal data are handled under the same process as any other data-protection contact (see the Privacy Notice).

6. Relationship to provider terms

Because BriefGate sends through Resend and Twilio, your use of the email and SMS features is also subject to those providers' own acceptable use policies as they apply to traffic routed through BriefGate's accounts. A breach of a provider's policy through your use of BriefGate is treated as a breach of this AUP.