Role Accounts

A role account is an address that stands for a function rather than a person: support@, admin@, billing@, info@, sales@. Mail sent to one usually lands in a shared inbox that several people read, and the address outlives whoever happens to staff it.

role_account is true when the local part of the address, the part before the @, is one of these. It describes the address rather than the domain, so it is returned by the email endpoint only, and is available in Gates as email.role_account.

What counts as a role account

The recognized set is broader than the handful of obvious ones. Alongside support and admin it covers functions like billing, careers, compliance, hr, it, legal, mail, marketing, noreply, office, orders, and many more.

Common variants are recognized as well, as the examples below show: a subaddress tag or a suffix like -eu does not hide the role, while a word that merely starts with a role name, like supporter, is not one.

Examples

Address	role_account	Why
[email protected]	true	A function, not a person
[email protected]	true	A variant of support
[email protected]	true	The tag does not hide the role
[email protected]	false	A different word, not a variant of support
[email protected]	false	An individual's address
[email protected]	true	Only the local part is matched, on any domain

Reading the field

A role account is a legitimate, working address. Organizations publish them deliberately and read the mail sent to them. What the field tells you is that the address is not tied to one individual: it may be read by a team and handled by different people over time.