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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March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
March2016_blog
Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

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We're all targets

Last week, another email provider announced their systems had a security incident. Mandrill’s internal security team detected unusual activity and took the servers offline to investigate. While there’s no sign any data was compromised or servers infiltrated, Mandrill sent an email to their customers explaining the incident was due to a firewall rule change.
Email service providers are a high value target for hackers, even if all they have is email addresses. Selling the email addresses is extremely profitable for hackers who can either sell the list outright or sell access to the list. In addition to gaining access to the email addresses, hackers often use the ESP to send these messages essentially stealing the ESP’s reputation to deliver the spam.
It was just over four years ago when a number of major ESPs were targets of a large attack and multiple ESPs were compromised. Earlier this month, three people were arrested for their roles in the attack. While the attacks four years ago were primarily spear phishing attacks, the security incident at Mandrill shows that hackers and botnets are actively probing the ESP’s network looking for access or known vulnerabilities. Spear phishing is an attempt to gain unauthorized access to a system by specifically targeting an individual, group, or organization. The scam attempts to have the user to click a link to infect their computer and network or capture their user id and password via a fake website. The scam email may appear to be sent from the company’s security or human resources department, but the email is either forged or another user’s account has been compromised.
Just because recent arrests have been made does not mean the threat is over. Systems often change, are upgraded, and are integrated with many additional services and systems can become vulnerable.  Security will never be a set and forget policy. In the last 12 months there has been two significant vulnerabilities discovered, first Heartbleed and second was POODLE. Security professionals from all industries had to react quickly to secure their systems and hackers immediately began probing for systems that were unpatched. GFI reports there were over 7,000 vulnerabilities discovered in 2014 with 24% of them being rated as high severity. Security must not only cover servers, but the transmission of the data internally and with third-party vendors, and the workstations of employees.
IT and security professionals must be ever vigilant in protecting their network and their customers data. SANS Institute provides a number of security control best practices including a document on Data Protection. The control recommendations range from quick wins to advanced considerations such as monitoring all traffic leaving the organization and being able to detect any unauthorized or unusual transfer of data, blocking access to file transfer protocols and file sharing websites, performing annual reviews of all keys, certifications, and security procedures.
One of the best ways to help the entire industry to be secure is to be transparent and open when incidents happen. Mandrill has published a blog post with the results of their investigation.

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February 2016: The Month in Email

Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures.
Feb2016forBlogIt was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if you should publish a DMARC policy.
On the subject of advice and guidance, Ask Laura continues to be a popular column — we’ve had lots of interesting questions, and are always looking for more general questions about email delivery. We can’t tackle specifics about your program in this column (get in touch if we can help you with that directly) but we can help with questions like “Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?” or “Help! I’m confused about authentication.”
Continuing on the authentication front, I noted that Gmail is starting to roll out some UI to indicate authentication status to users. It will be interesting to see if that starts to affect user (or sender) behavior in any way. In other interesting industry news, Microsoft has implemented an Office 365 IP Delisting page. I also wrote a followup post to my 2015 overview of the state of ESPs and purchased lists — it’s worth checking out if this is something your business considers.
I wrote a post about security and backdoors, prompted by both the FBI/Apple controversy and by Kim Zetter’s talk at M3AAWG about Stuxnet. These questions about control and access will only get more complicated as we produce, consume, store, and share more data across more devices.
Speaking of predictions, I also noted my contribution to a great whitepaper from Litmus that explores the state of Email Marketing in 2020.
As always, we looked at some best practices this month. I wrote up some of my thoughts about data hygiene following Mailchimp’s blog post about the value of inactive subscribers. As always, there isn’t one right answer, but there’s a lot of good food for thought. And more food for thought: how best practices are a lot like public health recommendations. As with everything, it comes down to knowing your audience(s) and looking at the relationship(s), which, as you know, is a favorite subject around here.

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