Most tools sell "your data is safe" as a trust signal — a reason to feel good about a purchase decision. For public hearings, policy briefings, and citizen notifications, it stops being a trust signal and becomes closer to a hard requirement: an agency often can’t legally or reputationally use a platform that pools sender identities or repurposes contact data across customers, full stop.
a shared sending pool is disqualifying, not just unappealing
Plenty of communication tools route messages through a shared sending infrastructure — same servers, same reputation pool, same underlying accounts, regardless of who the actual sender is. For a business, that’s a minor tradeoff. For a public agency sending notices about a zoning hearing or a policy change, it’s a different category of problem: citizen contact information moving through infrastructure the agency doesn’t control, attached to a sender identity that isn’t clearly and verifiably the agency itself.
why "your own SMTP" changes the calculus
Every invite and nudge routes through the agency’s own connected SMTP account — and its own SMS provider, if using text notices — never a shared pool with other customers. That means the sending domain, the deliverability reputation, and the actual account credentials stay entirely under the agency’s own control, the same way they would if the agency ran its own mail server. See the mechanics on the government and public-sector use case.
what happens to the data itself
Credentials — SMTP and SMS alike — are encrypted at rest in an isolated secrets vault and decrypted only in memory at the moment a batch actually sends. Citizen contact data is never sold or repurposed beyond delivering the specific notice it was collected for, and it’s portable: exportable at any time, deleted on a defined schedule after an account is closed. None of this is a special government tier — it’s the same handling every customer gets, which is exactly the point: there’s no separate, lower-trust default that public-sector use happens to sit above.
the same reliability, applied to a different stakes level
Mechanically, a public hearing notice works the same way as a company-wide all-hands briefing — a calendar invite, timed nudges, sent under the sender’s own identity rather than a generic broadcast address. What changes for public-sector use isn’t the mechanism. It’s that the privacy and control guarantees underneath it stop being optional.
compliance that doesn’t require a separate policy
Because sends go through the agency’s own accounts, the same compliance footing already governing the agency’s existing email and SMS communications applies here too — lawful basis, opt-outs, and the relevant messaging regulations, without a parallel policy needing to be written for one specific tool.
If your agency runs public notices, hearings, or citizen briefings, early access is open — or read the full privacy handling on our privacy policy.