Should You Send to info@ and sales@? Role Addresses Explained

Some role addresses are fine to email and some never are. Business inboxes such as info@, sales@ and hello@ exist to be contacted, and for small companies are often the owner's main inbox; send to them with a relevant, one-to-one message. Operations addresses such as abuse@, postmaster@ and noc@ exist to receive problem reports. Never market to them.

Most advice treats "role address" as one category and says either "always remove" or "it's fine". The standards that define these mailboxes, and the platforms that police them, draw a much sharper line, and that line is the useful one.

What a role address is, and why verifiers flag it

A role address belongs to a job or function rather than a person, and it can be perfectly valid while still being a poor recipient. Verification answers "does this mailbox exist?". For sales@company.com the answer is usually yes. What verification cannot tell you is who reads it, how many people do, or whether any of them want your email.

That is why most verifiers report role addresses as a flag alongside the result rather than as invalid. Some vendors place them differently: DeBounce gives role accounts their own result code, and ZeroBounce files them under do_not_mail. The mapping is in verification results explained. SimpleVerifier returns the mailbox result and flags the role address separately, so the decision stays with you.

Two kinds of role address, defined by RFC

The standard that names these mailboxes splits them into business addresses and operations addresses, and that split maps almost exactly to "sometimes fine" and "never". RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions", lists:

RFC 2142 group	Mailboxes	Purpose, in the RFC's words
Business	INFO, MARKETING, SALES, SUPPORT	"related to an organization's line-of-business activities"
Network operations	ABUSE, NOC, SECURITY	"intended to provide recourse for customers, providers and others who are experiencing difficulties"
Internet services	POSTMASTER, HOSTMASTER, WEBMASTER, WWW, USENET, NEWS, UUCP, FTP	Queries and reports about a specific protocol service

The RFC also notes that "The INFO name is often tied to an autoresponder", which is worth remembering when an info@ address sends an instant reply and nothing else.

The postmaster trap

RFC 5321 says: "Any system that includes an SMTP server supporting mail relaying or delivery MUST support the reserved mailbox 'postmaster'". In practice this means postmaster@ will verify as valid on nearly every working domain. A tool that tells you postmaster@company.com is valid is correct, and the result is useless for deciding whether to email it.

The abuse trap

abuse@ is where spam reports go. Sending marketing to it means sending your campaign directly to the people at that organisation whose job is to act on unwanted email. It is the worst possible inbox to land in uninvited.

What Mailchimp blocks

Mailchimp publishes the exact role prefixes it refuses to import, and its list is a useful real-world reference. Its help page, Limits on Role-Based Addresses, says role addresses "are often managed by several people or eventually fall into disuse" and that "Some of these types of addresses are associated with high bounce rates and spam complaints, so Mailchimp blocks them from your import."

The blocked prefixes, as published on 1 October 2026:

abuse@ admin@ billing@ compliance@ devnull@ dns@ ftp@ hostmaster@ inoc@ ispfeedback@ ispsupport@ list-request@ list@ maildaemon@ noc@ no-reply@ noreply@ null@ phish@ phishing@ postmaster@ privacy@ registrar@ root@ security@ spam@ support@ sysadmin@ tech@ undisclosed-recipients@ unsubscribe@ usenet@ uucp@ webmaster@ www@

Two things stand out:

• info@ and sales@ are not on the list. The most common business role addresses are not blocked by one of the largest email platforms.
• The block applies to imports, not consent. Mailchimp says "It's only during an import that these are blocked. A new subscriber with a role-based address should use your signup form to subscribe." A role address that opted in itself is treated as a legitimate subscriber.

Other platforms have their own rules; check your own platform's documentation before importing. For list preparation in Mailchimp generally, see how to clean your Mailchimp list.

The decision table

Decide by which role it is and how the address got onto your list.

Role address	Opted in through your form	Cold outreach, published on their website	On a bought or scraped list
info@, hello@, contact@, enquiries@	Send	Reasonable for small businesses, with a one-to-one message	Do not send
sales@	Send	Reasonable if you are offering something relevant to buyers, not selling to their sales team	Do not send
support@, help@	Send	Avoid. It is a customer service queue, not a buyer	Do not send
marketing@, press@, partnerships@	Send	Reasonable for the matching purpose (a PR pitch to press@)	Do not send
admin@, billing@, office@	Send	Avoid unless you have a specific reason	Do not send
abuse@, postmaster@, hostmaster@, noc@, security@, webmaster@	Rare, but respect it if they really subscribed	Never	Never
noreply@, no-reply@, unsubscribe@, list@	Should not be subscribing at all	Never	Never

Why small businesses are different

For a plumber, a roofer or a two-person agency, info@ frequently is the owner's inbox. There is no separate named address to find, and the generic one is where enquiries go because that is how the business wants to be contacted. Treating every info@ as low-value throws away exactly the contacts that are hardest to reach any other way. See cold email to local service businesses.

At a large company, info@ is more likely to be a shared queue triaged by someone with no buying authority. Look for a named contact first; how to find someone's business email covers the methods.

The real risks, stated precisely

Role addresses are risky in specific ways, and none of them is that the mailbox is fake.

1. More readers, more complaints. A message to a shared inbox is seen by several people, and any one of them can press "report spam". Complaint rate weighs heavily with mailbox providers; Yahoo, for example, asks senders to keep spam rate below 0.3% in its sender best practices.
2. No one person consented. Even if a colleague signed marketing@ up, the person reading it today may not know why they are getting your mail.
3. Disuse. Mailchimp's own wording is that role addresses "eventually fall into disuse". An abandoned role inbox can keep accepting mail long after anyone reads it. Abandoned addresses that keep accepting mail are one of the ways spam traps are created.
4. Autoresponders and ticketing systems. support@ often opens a ticket and sends an automatic reply. That can show up as a "reply" in your sequencing tool and distort your numbers.

Is it legal to email role addresses?

This is not legal advice. Two regulators' own texts are directly relevant:

• US: The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide states: "The law makes no exception for business-to-business email." Role addresses are covered like any other.
• UK: The ICO's guidance on electronic mail marketing says "You can email or text any corporate body", but that "Sole traders and some partnerships are treated as individuals", needing consent or a previous similar purchase. A small business's info@ may belong to a sole trader, which changes the rules.

More detail in is it legal to collect business emails and CAN-SPAM and cold email.

Practical takeaway

Split role addresses into two groups before you decide anything. Business inboxes (info@, sales@, hello@, press@) are contactable, especially at small companies, provided the message is relevant and one-to-one and the address came from a legitimate source. Operations and system addresses (abuse@, postmaster@, noc@, noreply@) come off every outbound list, whatever a verifier says about them, because a valid result there means nothing. To see whether a specific address is flagged as a role address, run it through the free single email checker.