What is a role address?
Also called: role account, generic email
A role address is an email address belonging to a function rather than a person — info@, sales@, support@, admin@, billing@. They are usually real and deliverable, but they are read by shared inboxes or nobody at all, so they perform badly in outreach and often attract spam complaints.
Verification tools flag role addresses separately because deliverability and usefulness are different questions. info@company.com will accept your mail; it simply will not be read by the decision-maker you were trying to reach.
For cold outreach, exclude them. For transactional or support mail, they are often exactly the right address. For list hygiene, they are worth flagging rather than deleting, because billing@ is a perfectly legitimate contact for an invoice.
Some role addresses — abuse@, postmaster@ — are required to exist by RFC and are monitored by people whose job is reporting spam. Sending cold outreach to those is an unusually direct route to a blocklist.
Last reviewed 2026-09-11