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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Thoughts on Gmail and the inbox

Over the last few months more and more marketers are finding their primary delivery challenge is the Gmail inbox. I’ve been thinking about why Gmail might be such a challenge for marketers. Certainly I have gotten a lot of calls from people struggling to figure out how to get into the Gmail inbox. I’ve also seen aggressive domain based filtering from Gmail, where any mention of a particular domain results in mail going to the bulk folder.
It’s one of those things that’s a challenge, because in most of these cases there isn’t one cause for bulk foldering. Instead there’s a whole host of things that are individually very small but taken together convince Gmail that the mail doesn’t need to be in the inbox.
A pattern that I’m starting to see is that Gmail is taking a more holistic look at all the mail from a sender. If the mail is connected to an organization, all that mail is measured as part of their delivery decision making. This is hurting some ESPs and bulk senders. I’ve had multiple ESPs contact me in the last 6 months looking for help because all their customer emails are going to bulk folder.
Gmail’s filtering is extremely aggressive. From my perspective it always has been. I did get an invite for a Gmail account way back in the day. I moved a couple mailing lists over to that account to test it with some volume and discussion lists. I gave up not long after because no matter what I did I couldn’t get gmail to put all the mail from that list into the tag I had set up for it. Inevitably some mail from some certain people would end up in my spam folder.
Gmail has gotten better, now they will let you override their filters but give you a big warning that the message would have been delivered to spam otherwise.
Gmail_NotSpam
What are mailers to do? Right now I don’t have a good answer. Sending mail people want is still good advice for individual senders. But I am not sure what can be done about this ESP wide filtering that I’m starting to see. It’s possible Gmail is monitoring all the mail from a particular sender or ESP and applying a “source network” score. Networks letting customers send mail Gmail doesn’t like (such as affiliate mail or payday mail, things they mentioned specifically at M3AAWG) are having all their customers affected.
I suspect this means that ESPs seeing problems across their customer base are going to have to work harder to police their customers and remove problematic mail streams completely. Hopefully, ESPs that can get on the Gmail FBL can identify the problem customers faster before those customers tank mail for all their senders.

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Spam filters and mailbox usage

It’s no secret that I run very little in the way of spam filters, and what filters I do run don’t throw away mail, they just shove it into various mailboxes.
Looking at my mailboxes currently I have 11216 unread messages in my mail.app junk folder, 10600 unread messages in my work spam assassin folder and 29401 messages in my personal spam assassin folder (mail getting more than +7 on our version of spam assassin gets filtered into these folders). I went through and marked all of my messages read back in mid-January. That’s a little over 50,000 messages in a little over 5 months or slightly more than 2700 spams a week.
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