4 Reasons NOT to Use “info@” as Your General Email Address

Prologue

Recently I cam across a “strange” problem with one of my clients. They reported that emails to btinternet.com accounts were not getting to the intended recipient. I ran a couple of email traces and all indications were that the email had a “0” spam rating score (which is excellent!) and that the btinternet.com server showed that the email had been received and excepted; all good. However the recipient did not receive the email and there was no error message received. The email just “disappeared” within the email systems of btinternet.com.

The email being sent was from an info@domainname.com account so after trying several things, we created a new email address of tim@domainname.com and sent the exact same email to the same btinternet.com email address and it arrived successfully. An email trace showed the exact same positive response as the info@ email trace we had done previously, the only difference was that the sending address was not info@

The conclusion we derived from this was that btinternet.com email accounts were blocking emails coming from an info@ email address. The worrying bit though was that no error message was received and the sender “assumed” the email had been delivered successfully. This is a major concern to business sending to btinternet.com email accounts.

This prompted me to investigate further and I concluded that using info@ email addresses as sending email addresses is not advisable. As a result of my search I have created an article below with my recommendations:-

4 Reasons NOT to Use “info@” as Your General Email Address

Info@ email addresses are not very friendly or personable.
If you consider the person you are sending emails to for a second. How do you think they feel about receiving an email from a generic, ambiguous and indefinable email address. A lot of people will wonder if , or how often the email address is monitored and if the person doing so is capable of helping or responding to your email. There is no “personal ownership” with info@ email addresses and certainly when sending emails, I would recommend using a more personal and engaging email address so that the recipient has confidence that the sender is putting his name to the email and therefore taking ownership of it.
Some service websites don’t allow you to use info@ email addresses.
There are a number of Websites such as Facebook that will not allow you to register for personal pages or business pages with an email address that starts with info@. Role based email addresses (addresses not related to an actual person) are becoming more frowned upon when creating email accounts.
You’re more likely to be flagged as spam with an info@ email address.
That’s right, as in my experience above with btinternet.com accounts, your important message or reply can be filtered into the abyss of junk email and you may not even know it? The reason for this is that a lot of companies are taking a hard line with regards to spam and by using info@ or other generic email accounts such as admin@, accounts@,webmaster@ etc, your email can be perceived as spam and the intended recipient may never receive your message.
On the flip side, info@ email addresses are more easily targeted to receive spam.
Not only do you not want your emails to be flagged as spam, but by using a generic email address such as info@, you are more likely to receive more spam. The reason for this is because the automated systems operated by big-time spammers often send emails to widlwy used generic email addresses like info@ as the success rates are pretty good.

So in summary, nowadays using an info@ email addresses can give a wrong perception of the sender, can risk being treated as spam and can attract more spam to your inbox. My recommendation is to look at alternative, more friendly and personable email addresses and we at Webvision can help you with that. All our customers who are using info@ (or other role based email addresses) as their primary email address can get a FREE personal email address from us and you can start phasing in the new address into your marketing material.