Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email

There was a discussion today on a marketing list about role accounts and marketing lists. Some ESPs block mail to role accounts, and the discussion was about why and if this is a good practice. In order to answer that question, we really need to understand role accounts a little more.

What are role accounts?

A definition I tend to use is role accounts are email addresses that map to a business function rather than an individual person. Often role accounts go to multiple people inside a company. These addresses can also point at ticketing systems, autoresponders, pagers or alarms.

Examples of role accounts

A few role accounts are defined by [rfc 2142], other role addresses are created by businesses to perform specific functions within the business.
There are different kinds of role accounts, too. There are send-only role accounts, like DoNotReply@ and mailer-daemon@. Some accounts are receive only, like subscribe@ or unsubscribe@. Others, like abuse@ or support@ both send and receive mail. Common role addresses are info@, orders@, noc@, webmaster@, postmaster@, hostmaster@.
In medium and large businesses, roles are not used to sign up for mail. Each employee has their own email address to use for signups and there is no need for role accounts to be on commercial lists. In small businesses, however, the role addresses may map directly to an individual who uses that address exclusively.

Why do ESPs prohibit them?

ESPs, and mailing list providers like yahoo groups, prohibit role accounts for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that, in general, role accounts are not subscribed to mailing lists. Anyone who would sign up for a mailing list with a role address will also have a non-role address to share. There are a lot of role accounts on commercial lists, though, because role addresses are easy to scrape off websites and they show up a lot on purchased lists. Mail to role accounts is not just a sign that a list may not be opt-in, but can also generate blocks at business filters.
Very occasionally, role addresses will be signed up to commercial lists. These are the addresses at the small businesses I mentioned above. For marketers catering to the very small business community, this can cause challenges when mailing through an ESP that generally prohibits role accounts.
All is not lost, some ESPs will allow customers to mail role accounts, with an extra level of verification. A few make the customer sign a contract guaranteeing that these addresses are opt-in. Other ESPs require role accounts to go through a double opt-in process. It’s worth working with your ESP to see what their particular rules are surrounding role addresses on lists.

Avoiding problems with role accounts

The presence of role accounts on lists is a red flag that the list may not be opt-in and because of that lists with many role accounts may undergo extra scrutiny or be blocked altogether.  ESPs automatically count the type of role accounts, and the specific accounts, on every uploaded list. Too many role addresses or just the wrong kind of role addresses (subscribe@ investors@), may get a list flagged for manual review before the customer is allowed to mail to that list.
Senders who want to avoid problems with role accounts on their lists can flag role addresses at collection time and ask for a non-role address instead.

 Should ESPs block mail to role accounts?

Overall, it is a net benefit to the ESP to prevent customers from mailing to role accounts without some sort of verification process. Experience says that lists with a significant number of role accounts are not opt-in and therefore cause delivery problems. ESPs are trying to protect both themselves and their customers by monitoring role addresses.

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IP reputation is a measure of how much wanted mail a particular IP address sends.  This wanted mail is measured as a portion of the total email sent from that IP. Initially IP reputation was really the be all and end all of reputation, there was no real good way to authenticate a domain or a from address. Many ISPs built complex IP reputation models to evaluate mail based on the IP that sent the mail.
These IP reputation models were the best we had, but there were a lot of ways for spammers to game the system. Some spammers would create lots of accounts at ISPs and use them to open and interact with mail. Other spammers would trickle their mail out over hundreds or thousands of IPs in the hopes of diluting the badness enough to get to the inbox. Through it all they kept trying to get mail out through reputable ESPs, either by posing as legitimate customers or compromising servers.
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These days your IP reputation dictates how fast you can send mail to a particular ISP. But a high reputation IP isn’t sufficient to get all the mail in the inbox. It’s really content that drives the inbox / bulk folder decisions these days.
 
Generally IPs that the ISP has not seen email traffic from before start out with a slight negative reputation. This is because most new IPs are actually infected machines. The negative reputation translates to rate limiting. The rate limiting minimizes people getting spam while the ISP works out if this is a real sender or a spammer.
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