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.

Related Posts

Blocking of ESPs

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on my post about upcoming changes that ESPs will be facing in the future. One thing some people read into the post is the idea that ISPs will be blocking ESPs wholesale without any regard for the quality of the mail from that company.
The idea that ESPs are at risk for blocking simply because they are ESPs has been floating around the industry based on comments by an employee at a spam filter vendor at a recent industry conference.
I talked to the company to get some clarification on what that spam filtering company is doing and hopefully to calm some of the concerns that people have.
First off, and probably most important, is that the spam filtering company in question primarily targets their service to enterprises. Filtering is an important part of this service, but it also handles email archiving, URL filtering and employee monitoring. The target market for the company is very different than the ISP market.
The ISPs are not talking about blocking indiscriminately, they are talking about blocking based on bad behavior.
Secondly, this option was driven by customer request. The customers of the spam filtering appliance were complaining about “legitimate” mail from various ESPs. Despite being reasonable targeted the mail was unrequested by the recipient. While ESPs use FBLs and other sources of complaints to clean complainers off rented or epended lists at ISPs, the option is not available for mail sent to corporations. Enterprises don’t, nor should they have to, create and support FBLs. Nor should employees be expected to unsubscribe from mail they never requested.
This option is the direct result of ESPs allowing customers to send spam.
Thirdly, this option is offered to those customers who ask for it. It is not done automatically for everyone. The option is also configurable down to the end user.
While I haven’t seen the options, nor which ESPs are affected, I expect that the ones on the list are the ones that the filtering vendor receives complaints about. If you are not allowing your customers to send spam, and are stopping them from buying lists or epending, then you probably have not come to the attention of the filtering company and are not on the list of ESPs to block.

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IP reputation and email delivery

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.
These things worked for a while, but the ISPs started looking harder at the recipient pool in order to figure out if the interactions were real or not. They started looking at the total amount of identical mail coming from multiple IP addresses. The ISPs couldn’t rely on IP reputation so they started to dig down and get into content based filtering.
As the ISPs got better at identifying content and filtering on factors other than source IP, the importance of the IP address on inbox delivery changed. No longer was it good enough to have a high reputation IP sending mail.
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.
Some ISPs put mail in the inbox and bulk foldering during the whitelisting process. In this case what they’re doing is seeing if your recipients care enough about your mail to look for it in the bulk folder. If they do, and they mark the mail as “not spam” then this feeds back to the sender reputation and the IP reputation.
If you’re seeing a lot of bulk foldering of mail, it’s unlikely there’s anything IP reputation based to do. Instead of worrying about IP reputation, focus instead on the content of the mail and see what you may need to do to improve the reputation of the domains and URLs (or landing pages) in the emails.

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SMTP Level Rejections

While discussing a draft of a Deliverability BCP document the issue came up of what rejections at different phases of the email delivery transaction can mean. That’s quite a big subject, but here’s a quick cheat sheet.
At initial connection
Dropped or failed connection:

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