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Should You Cold Email info@, sales@ and Other Role Addresses?
Role addresses look like reachable contacts in your export, info@, sales@, support@, office@. In cold campaigns they're mostly deliverability liabilities: unowned inboxes, spam-trap territory, and reply rates near zero. Here's the rule we run at 2M scraped leads a month, and the one narrow exception.
Quick Answer: Strip Them, With One Micro-Business Exception
Strip role addresses (info@, sales@, support@, admin@…) from cold campaigns by default, they're unowned inboxes with near-zero reply rates and above-average trap and complaint risk. The free CSV Cleaner flags and removes them at import. One exception: micro-businesses where info@ is genuinely the owner's inbox, run those as a separate campaign with business-addressed copy and a stricter 3% bounce stop, never mixed into your main sends.
Why the Export Is Full of Them, and Why That's a Trap
Scrapers and databases return role addresses because they're the easiest thing on the internet to find, every website footer has one. That's precisely the problem: an address every scraper finds is an address every spammer mails, which is why abandoned role inboxes are prime spam-trap real estate, why gateways score role-account blasts as a bulk fingerprint, and why an info@-heavy list reads "scraped, not researched" to filters and to the humans triaging the shared inbox. Add the practical absurdity, your "Hi Sarah, loved what you're doing at Acme" opening a mailbox read by whoever checks it Tuesdays, and the near-zero reply rate explains itself.
The Operating Rules
- •Strip at import, every import. Standard role local-parts (info, sales, support, admin, contact, office, hello, team, billing, hr, help…) get filtered before the sequencer sees the list, automated in the CSV Cleaner alongside disposable-domain and syntax checks. Verification alone won't save you here: an info@ can verify as deliverable and still be an unmonitored shared box (deliverable ≠ valuable).
- •Replace, don't just delete. The company was on your list for a reason, enrich to the named decision-maker and you usually recover the account at a far higher expected value than the role address ever had.
- •The micro-business exception is a separate campaign, not mixed rows: business-addressed copy (no fake first names), conservative volume, own segment, own 3% stop rule, the same isolation discipline as any elevated-risk segment.
- •Never as the extra contact at a company you're already emailing, adding info@ as "contact #4" at an account where you're threading named stakeholders combines both risks for zero upside (the multi-contact rules cover who the 3-4 should be).
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I cold email info@ and other role-based addresses?
Default rule: strip them from cold campaigns. Role addresses (info@, sales@, support@, admin@, office@, contact@) are unowned, your 'personalized' email lands in a shared or unmonitored inbox where nobody is the 'Hi {firstName}' you wrote to. Reply rates run near zero, complaint and trap risk runs higher than named addresses, and verification tools treat them as risky for good reason. The exception: very small local businesses where info@ genuinely is the owner's inbox, and that's a separate, differently-written campaign, not rows mixed into your main sends.
Why are role addresses a deliverability risk?
Several compounding reasons: abandoned role inboxes are prime spam-trap territory (a dead info@ that only spammers still mail is exactly what blocklist operators repurpose); shared inboxes mean unpredictable multiple readers, any of whom can report spam for mail that wasn't relevant to them; and blast patterns to role accounts are a classic bulk-sender fingerprint that filters and verification providers score against you. A list heavy in role addresses also signals scraped-not-researched to anyone auditing it, including you.
How do I remove role addresses from my list?
Filter local-parts against a role list: info, sales, support, admin, office, contact, hello, team, billing, hr, marketing, help, enquiries, and the rest of the standard set. Our free CSV Cleaner does this automatically, paste your list, it flags and strips role accounts (plus disposables and malformed rows) client-side before anything reaches your sequencer. Make it a standing import step, not a one-time cleanup.
When is emailing info@ actually reasonable?
Micro-businesses, local trades, small shops, single-location services, where the public info@ demonstrably is the owner's working inbox and often the ONLY address that exists. If that's your actual market, run it as its own campaign: copy addressed to the business ('Hi, reaching out to the team at Acme Plumbing') rather than a fake first name, tighter volumes, and its own segment with a stricter bounce stop (3%) so its different risk profile never touches your main fleet's reputation.
What should I do instead when I only have info@ for a company I want?
Find the named person, that's the whole game. A named, verified decision-maker converts at multiples of any role account, and modern enrichment makes most of them findable. If enrichment fails, decide honestly by segment size: a handful of dream accounts might justify manual research or a different channel (LinkedIn, phone); a long tail of info@-only rows is telling you those companies weren't findable enough to be worth your domain risk. Suppress them and move on.
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