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Sphere email and the law

Marketing to your own address book is legal under different rules than working a lead, and REHL treats the two differently. This article is worth reading closely, because it explains why some sphere touches send and others quietly do not.

Sphere email is email only

REHL will never text a sphere contact. Marketing texts need written permission first, and a past closing is not permission. Two separate checks in REHL enforce this, so a sphere text cannot go out even if something else is misconfigured.

Two lanes, and this is the part that surprises people

Relationship and listing touches

Just listed campaigns, just sold campaigns, birthdays, home anniversaries, and the Notify sphere button on a listing all send under the opt-out rules. No consent record needed. They go to your imported contacts as they are, with a working unsubscribe link and your postal address in the footer. The Notify sphere button also draws down a monthly email-blast allowance from your plan (Starter gets 1 a month); the automatic just listed campaign does not, since it is a different send path with no monthly count.

Everything else

Check-ins, market updates, community events, and custom campaigns take the lead path instead. That path needs the person promoted to a lead AND a consent record on that lead. Without both, the touch is marked skipped and nothing sends.

There is one wrinkle in the first group. Just sold, birthday, and home anniversary notes take the opt-out path only while the person is still just a sphere contact. Once you promote that person to a lead, those three switch to the stricter lead path and need a consent record like anything else, on the principle that the stronger protection wins once someone is a lead. Just listed alerts are unaffected and stay on the opt-out path either way.

Importing a contact does not create consent. Typing one in by hand does not. Promoting them to a lead does not either. Consent comes from the person themselves, normally by filling in a form on your branded site: requesting an agent, saving a search, an open-house RSVP, or a home valuation request.

What REHL checks before any sphere email leaves

  1. Your subscription is active or in trial. A lapsed account cannot send.
  2. For the Notify sphere button specifically: your plan still has an email blast left this month. One blast covers one listing regardless of how many people it reaches, re-sending the same listing again is free, and the count resets on the 1st. This check does not apply to just listed campaigns.
  3. Your brokerage has a postal address on file. No address, no send. Add it and the same message goes out on the next run.
  4. The recipient is not on your suppression list. An unsubscribe here is permanent and is never retried.
  5. It is inside the sending window. Outside it, the message waits rather than being dropped.
  6. The subject and body pass a Fair Housing screen. This runs on the final copy, including anything you edited after REHL AI drafted it.
  7. It has not already been sent. Nobody gets the same touch twice.

Who it comes from

If the person has an agent assigned, the email shows that agent's name and replies go to that agent's own inbox. If not, it shows your brokerage name, and replies fall back to the reply-to address set under email branding in Settings, then to your broker of record. Note that the From display name you set under email branding does not apply to sphere email: only reply-to carries over. A person with no assigned agent and no reply-to address configured anywhere in that chain gets a sphere email with nowhere for a reply to land.

The sending window for sphere email is 6am to 10pm in the time zone of your brokerage's state, not the recipient's own time zone. If you have contacts across the country, a message can land early or late for them.

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