Role address

What counts as one

A role address belongs to a function, not a person: info@, sales@, support@, admin@, billing@, hello@, contact@. RFC 2142 defines a standard set of them (postmaster, abuse, webmaster, info, sales, support, and others) that mail systems are expected to honour.

Why they carry extra risk in cold email

• Several people read them. Any one of them can mark your message as spam, and a single complaint counts against you.
• They are often monitored by filters. Role inboxes frequently sit behind ticketing systems and shared-mailbox rules that treat unsolicited mail harshly.
• Nobody owns the reply. Even a good message goes nowhere, so reply rate is poor.
• Some are traps. abuse@ and postmaster@ exist to receive reports; mailing them in bulk is a fast way to get reported.

Role addresses are not invalid. They verify fine, because the mailbox exists. They are just a poor target for personal outreach.

What to do

Verification tools flag them so you can decide, not so they are removed automatically. A reasonable default: exclude them from outbound sequences; keep them for transactional mail, and for the rare case where the role is the audience, such as a generic press@ for a PR pitch.

If the only address you can find at a company is a role address, treat that as a result worth knowing: the better move is finding a named contact. The email finder works from a person's name and a domain, so it targets a named mailbox rather than a role one. See also email verification.