Understanding role-based emails

Description

Role-based email addresses (like admin@, help@, sales@) are addresses that are not associated with a particular person, but rather with a company, department or group.

These addresses are not intended for personal use as they typically include a distribution list of multiple recipients.

Why this is important

It is no surprise that these are prime targets for spammers: easily obtained from the internet.
Senders with a high percentage of role accounts on their list(s) are at a higher risk of being blocked for using a harvested or purchased list. Due to the fact that role accounts are typically sent to more than one person, it is difficult to prove consent for each recipient

Also, Honeypot spam traps use role accounts to blacklist senders who send to them. By default, blacklist providers like Spamhaus will treat any email sent to these addresses as spam since they report that it was obtained and used without permission. In essence, using role accounts increases the risk of spam complaints and reduces the Sender reputation.

How to manage these role-based emails

We maintain a master suppression list of more than 400 common role-based addresses. While the full list is not made public, we can tell you it does get updated frequently to ensure our clients maintain a high level of email delivery.

Typical role-based email accounts include:

• sales@
• support@
• office@
• admin@
• abuse@
• postmaster@
• webmaster@
• billing@
• help@
• noc@

When someone attempts to send to a role-based email, these emails are automatically suppressed and do not get sent.