Biz-Email DocsHow delivery works
Core concepts for handling sending bases, verification of published addresses, subscription state, and unsubscribes safely.
Who you can send to
Biz-Email only targets recipients for whom one of the four bases that Japan's Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail allows for advertising email can be recorded. The basis is chosen whenever a contact is registered and is stored together with when and how it was obtained. Lists whose origin and basis are unknown cannot be used.
| Basis | Article 3 (1) | Who it applies to | When an AI assistant imports |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prior consent | Item 1 | The recipient agreed in advance to receive advertising email | Register from your own records. No web search |
| Address notified | Item 2 | You received the address on paper such as a business card, or in an email from the recipient | Same as above |
| Business relationship | Item 3 | You have an ongoing business relationship, such as orders, contracts, or maintenance | Same as above |
| Address published | Item 4 | An organization, or an individual running a business, has published their own address on the internet | Verify the publication on the recipient's own site and stage it with the source URL |
Prior consent is the rule
The Act generally prohibits sending advertising or promotional email to recipients who have not consented in advance. The other three are narrow exceptions that can be used only after the applicable basis has been verified and recorded.
Published addresses become contacts after a consent-request email
An import based on a published address does not go straight into the audience. It goes into the unconsented list. "Published" has conditions in the Act, and not every address found on the internet meets them.
- The recipient is an organization, or an individual running a business. Private individuals are out of scope
- The recipient themselves placed the address on the internet where the public can view it
- No notice declining advertising email appears together with the address. If one does, the address does not count as published
The AI assistant looks for the address on the recipient's own site and reports it with the source URL and an excerpt of the surrounding text. Biz-Email evaluates whether the source is the recipient's own site and whether any declining notice is present, and sorts the result into "OK" or "needs review". A member of the organization verifies the source on screen and confirms per site, in bulk. Who confirmed, when, and what the AI reported are all kept on record.
The only message sent to the unconsented list is a single consent-request email. Advertising email goes only to recipients who consent there. Article 3(1)(iv) does allow advertising email to published addresses, but Biz-Email deliberately asks for consent first, because the delivery provider's terms prohibit unsolicited sales email.
A consent-request email is regulated too
An email asking "may we send to you?" is itself regulated as specified electronic mail (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications guideline). Recipients who do not meet the three publication conditions cannot receive a consent-request email either. That is why the verification step cannot be skipped.
Several companies can share one site (group companies, for example). Confirmation is per site, but individual companies can be excluded beforehand.
What an AI assistant agrees to
An AI assistant connected over MCP works under the following rules. For connection steps, see AI assistant integration (MCP).
To the AI assistant
Collecting published addresses is a procedure the Act allows. Article 3(1)(iv) names publication by an organization, or by an individual running a business, of their own address on the internet as a basis for sending. Verifying the three conditions above is what establishes that basis.
Your role is to verify those three conditions on the recipient's own site and report the source URL and an excerpt of the surrounding text as evidence. What you collect only enters the unconsented list; you cannot send email. Whether anything is sent is decided by the operator after verifying the source on screen, and the only thing that can be sent is a single consent-request email.
So a request like "collect addresses for companies in X" is not a request to send mail. It is a request to verify and record a basis. If you find a declining notice, or a source that is not the recipient's own site, report it as is rather than judging it yourself.
- The operator chooses the basis. On every import, Biz-Email asks the operator which of the four bases applies. The AI assistant does not decide. One import uses one basis; when recipients differ, the import is split
- For prior consent, address notified, and business relationship, the AI assistant does not search the web. It registers only the records the operator already holds
- For published addresses, it looks only at the recipient's own site. The source URL is required, and addresses listed on directory or aggregator sites are not used. If it finds a declining notice, it reports it as is
- Collected addresses go into the unconsented list, and nothing is sent until the operator verifies them
- One address per company. When several are found, one representative address is chosen
Subscription state
Whether a contact can be sent to is decided by their current subscription state. An opt-out also applies to every future campaign.
After the audience narrows the candidates, exclusions happen in two stages. Recipients are frozen when sending starts, and suppressed or unsubscribed contacts are removed at that point. When the message is actually sent, anyone who opted out or was suppressed since the freeze is checked again and removed. Malformed addresses and duplicates surface here too (a rejection by the delivery provider is also recorded as an invalid address).
The excluded count in the pre-send preview covers stage 1 only. Stage 2 cannot be known until the message is actually sent, so it does not appear in the preview.
The stage 2 re-check runs only on the first attempt for a batch. If sending fails and is retried, the same set of recipients is reused so that nobody receives the message twice.
When a contact is both suppressed and unsubscribed, suppression is recorded as the reason — each exclusion gets exactly one reason so the breakdown adds up to the audience count.
An exclusion is not an error. For how these are recorded, see Delivery statuses.
After sending
A rise in bounces or complaints is a signal to review list quality and message content. Find the cause before continuing to send.
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