Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email

laura
Industry
June 20, 2014

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.

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.

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.

The more things change

I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003.

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.