Role accounts

A question came up on a recent deliverability panel about role accounts.
roleaccount

What is a role account?

A role account is an email address that goes to a particular role or position rather than to a person. In many cases email to that address gets sent to a ticketing system or sent to multiple people. Sometimes the address does go to a single person. The point of role accounts is to have standardized addresses that can be contacted at most domains.

Why do people use role accounts?

Businesses use role accounts for a number of reasons.

  • To maintain coverage for certain addresses after hours.
  • To provide one point of contact that can be passed on to different employees (on call pager).
  • To maintain business continuity.
  • To route email to the appropriate departments or people.
  • To route email to ticketing systems.

Even businesses as small as Word to the Wise use role accounts. There are certain messages we value so much, we route those addresses to multiple people inside the company. Some sole proprietors also use role accounts to keep certain messages out of their personal inbox.

Why do many ESPs prohibit mailing to role accounts?

Because role accounts are about a position, not a person, it’s hard to guarantee there is permission associated with the subscription. In fact, even if one of the recipients opted in the role account it’s possible other recipients would see the mail as spam.  It is true that some role accounts are used as personal addresses, but this is not the normal use case. On balance, blocking mail to role accounts minimizes spam complaints with very little collateral damage.
It’s not just ESPs that prohibit mail to role accounts. Some mailing list providers (Yahoogroups, for instance) prohibit adding some role accounts to accounts they host.
Yes, there are cases where role accounts are the right place to send bulk mail. Accounting mail between companies are the obvious use case. There are some small businesses that use role accounts to subscribe to lists and get business mail.

What if I need to mail role accounts?

Some ESPs allow mail to role accounts, if certain conditions are met. These conditions vary by the situation. If you’re in a place where some addresses are blocked. Be prepared to demonstrate your opt-in process and how you’re verifying the accuracy of the subscription. You may also need to submit samples of your emails and some justification for mailing the role accounts.
Different ESPs have different rules for granting exceptions. Some ESPs will not grant exceptions to their policies so you may have to find an ESP that better fits your needs.

Conclusion

Overall, role accounts are about email to a particular job function. These functions are not always good targets for marketing mail, particularly unsolicited marketing mail. This is why ESPs often prohibit mail to role accounts by default. However, as with everything in email there are some exceptions. If you have an exceptional issue talk to support or deliverability about your needs and if there are ways to alleviate their concerns.
 

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May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

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Dealing with blocklists, deliverability and abuse people

There are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well.
The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” Trust me, the folks blocking your mail don’t want to hear about your business model. They just want you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the space who actually wants to hear about your business model – so I can help you reach your goals without doing things that get you blocked.
A few months ago, after getting off yet another phone call where I talked clients down from explaining their business model to Spamhaus, I put together list of phrases that senders really shouldn’t use when talking to their ESP, a blocklist provider or an abuse desk. I posted it to a closed list and one of the participants put it together into a bingo card.
bingo__email__save_1
A lot of these statements are valid marketing and business statements. But the folks responsible for blocking mail don’t really care. They just want their users to be happy with the mail they receive.

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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.

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