Role accounts

laura
Industry
June 21, 2016

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

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.

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.

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.

Mandrill changes

Last week Mandrill announced that they were discontinuing their free services and all customers would be required to have a corresponding paid Mailchimp account.

February 2016: The Month in Email

Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures.
It 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.