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Glossary · Email

Role address

An address that belongs to a function rather than a person, such as info@, support@ or sales@.

Role addresses reach a shared mailbox or a ticket queue. They are perfectly valid and often the correct contact for a business, but they behave differently from personal addresses in outbound campaigns: no single person owns them, several people may see them, and spam complaints from them carry more weight with mailbox providers.

Detection is prefix matching against a known set of role names, so it is exact rather than probabilistic. The result should be treated as a routing signal, not an error.

For transactional mail a role address is fine. For cold outreach it usually is not: sending marketing to info@ is a common trigger for complaints, and complaints damage sender reputation for every other recipient.