Can subscribers sign up to my list using role-based email addresses?

A subscriber can sign up with a role-based email through a sign up form or by being manually added. Whenever a subscriber attempts to sign up on your form using a role-based email address, they will need to fill out a captcha element and confirm their subscription to be added. The captcha element would look similar to the following:

The reason why captcha and confirmation would be required for a role-based email address is to ensure that the subscriber is indeed using a legitimate email address that they actively manage. This is a best practice to help ensure the deliverability of your messages remains as high as possible so you're not emailing unmanaged addresses.

What are role-based email addresses?

A role-based email address is an address that companies use to define a particular job or department of that company. Generally, these addresses are not associated with any one particular person at the company, but rather they can be checked by multiple people at the company. The role in the email address is specified before the domain in the address.

Some examples of what role-based email addresses might start with can be found below:

• admin@
• orders@
• payments@
• press@
• sales@
• support@
• webmaster@

While the above list does not contain all of the role-based email addresses, it can give you a general idea of how those addresses might look.

Why are role-based email addresses blocked from being imported?

Simply put, role-based emails generate a lot of spam complaints.

Role-based email addresses are usually found easily on websites (generally on the "Contact Us" page of a site) and therefore are most commonly found on scraped/harvested email lists. Essentially, these lists are built by just grabbing the role-based email addresses from various websites, which is not an approved method for gathering subscribers.

Since more than one person usually checks a role-based email address, the initial person that signed up for the mailing list will not necessarily be the person to receive the messages associated with that list. This also results in role-based email addresses being inactive on mailing lists that they are added to. Since no single person is responsible for checking that address, mailing list related emails will generally go unread.

So for example, let's say John, Mary, and Jane all receive messages sent to "support@example.com." If John signs up for a mailing list with that address, then Mary and Jane would have no idea why they are receiving messages for that list, and they might be more inclined to delete those messages or mark them as spam.

What happens when a subscriber is imported with a role-based email address?

If you import subscribers with role-based email addresses you will usually see this in your import history:

If you have some role-based email addresses, you could contact them outside of AWeber and recommend they sign up for your list through your sign up form. They will need to fill out the captcha element and confirm their subscription to be added.