Skip to content

Role address

published · September 10, 2026

A role address is a mailbox named for a function rather than a person: info@, support@, billing@, postmaster@.

A role address is a mailbox named for a function rather than a person: info@, support@, billing@, postmaster@, abuse@. It is usually a shared inbox or an alias fanning out to several people.

What Spaw answers

role is true and the reason is role. The verdict is risky and the risk score carries +30. The local part is matched against an open list of role names, so the check is about the name before the @ and never about the domain.

A role address is still probed. It nearly always exists and nearly always accepts mail — the caution is about who reads it, not whether it works.

Why it is risky rather than fine

Shared inboxes are monitored unevenly, and the person who filled in your form is often not the person who reads it. For a transactional message that is fine; for a marketing list, role addresses are where complaint rates come from, because whoever opens the mail did not sign up for it.

Nothing here recommends rejecting them. The verdict names the fact and leaves the policy to you.

Related

markdown version: /glossary/role-address.md

Verify addresses the same way

The Spaw API runs every check described here on each lookup, with an SMTP handshake that never sends mail. 10 free lookups a month, no card required.

Get your API key

More glossary

  • ASN

    An Autonomous System Number identifies one network that announces its own routes to the internet under a single routing policy.

  • Address register

    An address register is a country's official file of every address its authorities recognise, usually keyed on buildings rather than letterboxes.

  • CIDR

    CIDR notation writes a range of IP addresses as one address and a prefix length, so 203.0.113.0/24 means the 256 addresses sharing those first 24 bits.

  • Catch-all domain

    A catch-all domain is one whose mail server accepts mail addressed to every recipient, whether or not that mailbox exists.

  • Check digit

    A check digit is a digit computed from the rest of an identifier so that a mistyped one usually fails arithmetic before anybody looks it up.

  • Company number

    A company number is the identifier a national registrar assigns to an incorporated company, unique within that register and never within the world.

  • Credit

    A credit is the billing unit of the whole API: one credit buys one fresh lookup that produced a usable answer, on any of the six signals.

  • Datacenter IP

    A datacenter IP is an address inside a range operated by a hosting, cloud or server provider rather than by a consumer access network.