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Role Accounts
Role-based email addresses (e.g. admin@, help@, sales@) are email addresses that are not associated with a particular person, but rather with a company, department, position or group of recipients.
They are not generally intended for personal use, as they typically include a distribution list of recipients.
Negative Outcomes
The main issue is that it is not possible to prove that everyone who will receive emails at these addresses has given their consent to receive them. Additionally, these addresses are commonly included in many websites (like on a Contact Us page), which means they are more susceptible to being harvested off the internet. Email harvesters love to scrape role account addresses from websites. Your ESP knows this and watches your list for a high concentration of these accounts. Send to too many and your reputation will suffer.
As if that’s not enough, blacklist providers such as Spamhaus use role accounts like these as "honeypot" spam traps in an attempt to catch spammers claiming that any email sent to those addresses is spam by default because the address was obtained and used without permission.
Lastly, these unintended recipients could be “habitual protestors” or frequent spam complainers. Compounding the consequences on a well-placed compliant message, you can't prove consent for all recipients, which makes it easy to run afoul of anti-spam legislation.
Questions? Please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have about our cleansing process or your results, and we look forward to you experiencing the results that truly set Impressionwise apart!
