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Terms of Service

Last updated: September 30, 2026

These terms govern your use of Duva. Please read them before you start: they give Duva wide latitude to suspend an account, because our sending addresses are shared by all our customers and their reputation has to be protected first.

The French version is the authoritative one (see section 14).

1. Who we are and who these terms are for

Duva is a transactional email service operated by 9573-4562 Québec inc. (Québec business number NEQ 1182434036, 302 de l'Éboulis, Rimouski, QC G5L 7Z2) ("Duva", "we", "us"). These terms apply to anyone who uses the service, the API, the dashboard or the duva.ca website ("you", "the customer").

Duva is for businesses and professionals. It is not offered to consumers: you represent that you use it for business purposes. If you act for an organization, you represent that you have the authority to bind it.

You accept these terms as soon as you accept an invitation, create an account, create or use an API key or subscribe to a plan, whichever happens first. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

2. The service

Duva receives your application's emails through an API or by SMTP and sends them from your domains. It also provides delivery, bounce and complaint tracking, suppression lists, webhooks and statistics. The service is described in the API reference and on the Plans page.

  • Duva is transactional: confirmations, receipts, password resets, alerts and notifications that the recipient expects. It is not a newsletter or bulk-mailing tool (see section 4).
  • We may change, add or remove features, limits and technical rules (rate, message size, accepted headers), in particular to protect the service and the reputation of our addresses.
  • Sign-up is open to everyone. A new account starts in the sandbox (limited); moving it to production must be approved by a member of our team, who may accept or refuse it without having to give reasons.
  • No delivery guarantee. We accept your email, then hand it to the recipient's server. That server accepts, files or rejects it: we control neither the inbox, nor the spam filter, nor the delays.
  • The status page, if published, is provided for information only and is not a service-level commitment or an availability guarantee.

3. Your account

  • The information you give us must be accurate and current, including your email address.
  • A second authentication factor is required to sign in.
  • Your API keys are secret. You are responsible for everything sent with your keys and everything done from your account, including by members of your team. Tell us without delay if a key or an access is lost or compromised, and revoke the key.
  • You represent that you have the right to send email from the domains you add, and you keep control of them, including their DNS records.
  • You may not share your account, or transfer or resell your access, without our written consent.

4. Acceptable use

You agree to comply with applicable laws, including Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the Québec Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, PIPEDA and the laws of the places where your recipients are located.

You must:

  • send only emails that the recipient expects or has asked for, or for which you have valid consent or a statutory exemption;
  • clearly identify the sender and honour unsubscribe requests without delay;
  • keep your lists accurate and stop writing to addresses that bounce or complain;
  • reply promptly when we contact you about a report.

You must not:

  • send spam, meaning unsolicited email, or use lists that were bought, rented, scraped or built without consent;
  • send newsletters, promotions or bulk messages, unless we have agreed in writing beforehand;
  • engage in phishing, fraud or impersonation, or use a false sender, misleading headers or misleading content;
  • transmit malware or dangerous links or attachments;
  • send illegal, hateful, threatening or harassing content, or content that infringes a third party's rights;
  • send from a domain you do not control or have no right to use;
  • bypass or attempt to bypass limits, quotas, suppression lists, verifications or security controls, including by creating multiple accounts;
  • attack, probe, overload or disrupt the service, or try to access another customer's data;
  • resell the service or use it as a relay for third parties without our written consent;
  • send by email information that the law requires to be protected at a level the service does not claim to provide, such as full payment card numbers, health information, social insurance numbers or passwords in plain text.

Excluded sectors. We do not provide the service to promote, sell or operate the following activities, even where they are legal where you are, unless we have agreed in writing beforehand. This list is not exhaustive: we may add any sector that, in good faith, appears to us to harm the reputation of our addresses or the delivery of our customers' emails.

  • illegal goods and services;
  • pornographic or sexually explicit content and escort services;
  • the sale of drugs or pharmaceutical products;
  • gambling and betting;
  • multi-level (network) marketing, pyramid schemes and chain letters;
  • affiliate marketing;
  • "get rich quick" or make-money-online opportunities, including investment, crypto or trading schemes that promise or imply returns;
  • binary options, contracts for difference (CFDs), speculative forex or crypto, initial coin offerings (ICOs) and token "airdrops";
  • payday loans and other high-cost short-term loans, credit repair, debt settlement and debt collection agencies;
  • list brokering or list rental;
  • selling "likes", followers or other social media engagement;
  • any activity that requires a licence or registration that you do not have.

Thresholds. We monitor, among other things, bounce, complaint and suppressed-address rates. For each account and each domain, these rates are measured on accepted emails, over 24 hours or 7 days, from 100 accepted emails:

  • complaints: a rate of 0.10% or more triggers an alert (written notice and time to correct, section 5.2); a rate of 0.30% or more is critical (suspension possible without notice, section 5.1);
  • bounces: a rate of 5.00% or more triggers an alert (same treatment); a rate of 10.00% or more is critical (same treatment as for complaints).

A rate below these thresholds is not a guarantee: a rate above what major mailbox providers tolerate, even at low volume, may be treated as a breach of these rules. We do not have to wait for a provider to block us before acting.

Transactional emails sent through Duva benefit from the exemption in section 6(6) of Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation: the consent and unsubscribe rules of section 4 of that law target your promotional sending, not your transactional email. That law can also hold liable anyone who "causes or permits" the sending of a non-compliant message (section 9): that is what justifies our controls.

5. Suspension, restriction and end of service

Our IP addresses and infrastructure are shared by all our customers: a single problematic message can harm everyone. That is why the following rules distinguish serious or imminent harm, which calls for immediate action, from other breaches.

5.1 Immediate suspension. We may suspend an account, a domain, an API key or access to all or part of the service without notice when necessary to prevent serious or imminent harm to the service, other customers or third parties, in particular:

  • in cases of spam, phishing, fraud or impersonation;
  • when bounce or complaint rates reach the critical thresholds in section 4, or other reputation indicators exceed what providers tolerate;
  • when a mailbox provider, an infrastructure provider, a blocklist or an authority asks or requires us to;
  • when an account's security appears to be compromised;
  • when the law requires it, or the service or other customers are at risk.

We notify you as soon as reasonably possible, with the reason, unless the law or security considerations forbid it.

5.2 Other breaches. For any other breach of these terms, including false, incomplete or unverifiable information, we give you written notice and a reasonable period — generally 5 business days — to fix it before suspending or closing the account. For a repeated breach, we may act without a new grace period.

5.3 Inactive account. We may also suspend or close a paid account that has been inactive for 12 consecutive months, with at least 30 days' notice.

5.4 Our assessment. To act under section 5.1 or 5.2, we do not have to establish the intent, seriousness or frequency of a breach: our good-faith assessment is enough. We are not liable for the consequences of a suspension made in good faith and in accordance with this section.

5.5 Review by a person. You may ask that a suspension be reviewed by a person by writing to us; we reply within 3 business days.

5.6 Reinstatement. We may reinstate a suspended account if the problem is corrected to our satisfaction, but we are not obliged to. We may require corrections, information or assurances first.

5.7 Sandbox. We may limit, suspend or close a free or sandbox account at any time, without giving a reason.

5.8 Termination without breach on your part. We may also end a paid subscription, or the service, for any other reason, with at least 30 days' notice.

5.9 Your cancellation. You may stop using the service and cancel your subscription at any time (section 6).

5.10 Refund. Except for serious harm under section 5.1, we refund on a prorated basis the part of the prepaid price that corresponds to the unused period when we suspend or close your account under this section. No refund is due when you cancel yourself (section 5.9), unless the law requires one.

5.11 Effects of termination. Access ends and API keys stop working. Pending messages may be deleted. Your data is destroyed as described in the privacy policy, generally within 30 days of closure. Export what you need before the end: we are not required to return it afterwards. Provisions that by their nature continue after the service ends (liability, indemnification, governing law) remain in force.

6. Plans, prices and payment

  • Plans, their limits and their prices are those on the Plans page or agreed in writing. Prices are in Canadian dollars and exclude taxes: GST, QST and other applicable taxes are added.
  • A subscription is monthly, paid in advance and renewed automatically until cancelled. Payment is processed by Stripe; we do not receive or store your card number. You authorize us to charge each period.
  • You may cancel at any time from the billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period, and you keep access until then.
  • Plan limits apply: beyond them, messages are refused and nothing extra is charged. Unused volume does not carry over.
  • We may change a plan's prices and limits with at least 30 days' notice (by email or in the dashboard); you may cancel before the change takes effect. We may change a technical limit immediately when necessary to protect the service.
  • If a payment is declined or overdue, we may suspend the account or move it back to the sandbox.
  • There is no trial period. The sandbox is free and limited.

7. Your content and your data

  • You remain the owner of your content: messages, attachments and data about your recipients. You authorize us to receive, store, process and transmit it to provide the service, and to review it in the cases described below.
  • You are solely responsible for your content, your recipient lists, the consent you obtained and the lawfulness of your sending.
  • The personal information of your recipients is your responsibility. We process it on your behalf, for the sole purpose of the service, as described in the privacy policy and the data processing addendum, which is part of it.
  • We keep the content of emails for only 30 days; information about sends (sender, recipients, subject, events) is kept longer. Do not rely on Duva to archive your emails: keep your own copy.
  • Reviews. In practice, our staff console does not display the content of emails. We nevertheless reserve the right to access it, by any means, when necessary to investigate a report or an abuse, protect the service or other people, ensure security or comply with the law or a court order. Where the law allows, we may disclose to a mailbox provider, a complaint-handling service or an authority the information needed for an abuse investigation.

8. Our rights

Duva, its code, its API, its documentation and its trademarks belong to us or to our licensors. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to use the service while you have access and in accordance with these terms. You may not attempt to extract its source code or use it to build a competing service, except where the law allows it. We may freely use your feedback and suggestions.

9. Security

We take reasonable measures to protect the service and your data; they are described in the privacy policy. No system is infallible. If an incident affects your data, we will notify you as the law requires. For your part, you protect your credentials and keys.

10. No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent permitted by law, we give no warranty, express or implied, including of continuous availability, delivery, inbox placement, absence of errors or fitness for a particular purpose. We may interrupt the service for maintenance or security reasons.

11. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law:

  • we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or special damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, customers or data, or harm to reputation, even if we were told they were possible;
  • our total liability to you, for all claims combined, is limited to the amounts you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the event, or to CAD 100 if you paid nothing;
  • we are not liable for the acts or omissions of mailbox providers, network providers, Stripe or any other third party, or for a suspension made in accordance with these terms.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits a liability that the law forbids excluding or limiting, in particular for intentional or gross fault, or for bodily or moral injury (article 1474 of the Civil Code of Québec).

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless us, our officers, employees and suppliers from third-party claims, and from direct and reasonable losses, fines and expenses arising from them (including reasonable legal fees), when they result from your content, your sending, your breach of these terms or of the law, or the infringement of a third party's rights, including recipient complaints and blocks of our addresses caused by your sending. We notify you promptly of such a claim and reasonably cooperate in its defence. Except for your gross or intentional fault, this indemnification is limited to an amount equal to the amounts you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the claim, or to CAD 100 if you paid nothing.

13. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. A material change — in particular a price increase, a reduction of your rights or a new restriction that significantly limits the service's intended use — comes with at least 30 days' notice, by email or in the dashboard; a change may take effect immediately if it is necessary to comply with the law, ensure security or fight abuse. The date of the last update appears at the top of this page. If you keep using the service after the change takes effect, you accept the new terms; otherwise, stop using it and cancel your subscription.

14. Governing law, disputes and language

These terms are governed by the laws of Québec and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The competent courts of the judicial district of Rimouski have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

Individual actions. To the extent permitted by law, you may bring a claim against Duva only on an individual basis: you waive the right to bring, or to join, a class action or any other representative proceeding against us relating to the service or these terms. This waiver does not apply to a complaint to a regulatory authority, or to a right that the law does not allow you to waive.

The parties have expressly required that these terms and all related documents be drawn up in French. This English version is provided for convenience; if the two differ, the French version prevails. Les parties ont expressément exigé que ces conditions et tous les documents qui s'y rattachent soient rédigés en français.

15. General provisions

  • These terms, the Plans page, the privacy policy and the data processing addendum are the entire agreement between you and us about the service.
  • If a provision is invalid or unenforceable, the others remain in force.
  • Not exercising a right is not waiving it.
  • We may assign these terms to an affiliate or a successor; you may not assign them without our written consent.
  • We are not liable for a delay or failure caused by an event beyond our reasonable control.
  • We contact you by email, at your account's address, or through the dashboard.

16. Contact us

For any question about these terms: [email protected].

To report abuse (spam or content sent through Duva): [email protected].