TL;DR
- Role addresses (
info@,sales@,support@,admin@) reach a team or a system, not one person. - They usually exist, so they don't hard bounce. The risk is low engagement and spam complaints, not bounces.
- We mark them risky with the reason
low_quality, so you can keep or drop them as a group.
What counts as a role address
The part before the @ names a function rather than a person. Some exist by convention or standard: postmaster@ is
required for any domain that receives mail (RFC 5321), and
RFC 2142 lists others such as abuse@, webmaster@,
sales@ and support@ (both checked 2026-10-17). Most are just common business habits.
| Group | Examples on our role list |
|---|---|
| General contact | info, hello, contact, office, mail, hi, enquiries |
| Sales and marketing | sales, marketing, newbusiness, partnerships, press, media |
| Support and service | support, help, service, customerservice, care |
| Internal teams | hr, jobs, careers, billing, accounts, finance, legal |
| Technical | admin, postmaster, abuse, webmaster, hostmaster, noreply, no-reply |
Our list has about 120 prefixes, tuned against real agency and B2B lists. We match the whole local part and ignore any
+tag, so [email protected] counts as role but [email protected] and [email protected] don't.
Why verifiers flag role addresses
- Nobody owns them. Your message lands in a shared queue or ticketing system. Whoever reads it didn't ask to hear from you.
- Complaints. A shared inbox has several people who can hit "report spam", and complaint rate is something mailbox providers watch closely. Google's sender guidelines (checked 2026-10-17) ask senders to keep their spam rate below 0.3%.
- Distribution lists. One role address can forward to many people, which multiplies the complaint risk.
- Some never read mail.
noreply@andno-reply@are for sending only, and some technical addresses go to monitoring tools.
Role addresses are also a common feature of scraped lists, because they're the addresses printed on websites.
How MailExchange labels them
We still run the full mailbox check on a role address. That decides the result:
| Mailbox check | Result |
|---|---|
| Accepted, domain not catch-all | risky: low_quality |
| Accepted, domain is catch-all | risky: low_deliverability (the catch-all is the bigger risk) |
Refused (e.g. 550 5.1.1) | undeliverable: rejected_email |
So a role address that doesn't exist is reported as dead, not just risky. The full list of results is in email verification statuses.
Should you email role addresses?
For cold outreach, usually not as part of your main campaign. Keep them when:
- There's no named contact at the company, and the account is worth reaching.
- The inbox fits the message:
partnerships@for a partnership pitch,press@for a media pitch. - It's a very small business where
hello@is read by the owner.
Send kept role addresses as a separate segment at lower volume, the same way you'd treat
catch-all addresses. Never email abuse@, postmaster@ or noreply@.
[email protected] is usually a real business,
so many teams accept role addresses at signup and only block disposable ones.