Almost every SME CRM has them: contacts called "Info", "Sales Team" or "Accounts Payable", with an address like [email protected]. They arrive through web forms, signatures, invoices and imports, and nobody decides whether they belong there. Left alone, they inflate contact counts, end up as the main contact on deals and quietly hide the fact that you do not know who you are actually talking to. Pomio CRM recommends one simple rule: a generic address belongs to the company, and a contact is a person.
Why generic addresses cause trouble
A generic mailbox is read by whoever happens to be on duty. Nobody owns it, it cannot make a decision and it does not change jobs. When it is stored as a contact, reports count it as a relationship, sequences treat it as a lead and salespeople log calls against it that were really with a person whose name was never written down. The CRM looks full while the real decision-makers are missing.
Store it on the company first
The natural home for info@ or invoices@ is the company record, as the company's general email address or in a short note that says what each address is for. That keeps it available for anyone who needs to reach the company without pretending it is a person. Every real contact should then be linked to that company, so the generic address and the people sit side by side.
If it must be a contact, label it
Sometimes a generic address has to exist as a contact, for example because emails are logged against it or because invoices go there. In that case mark it with one label from your fixed list of labels, such as "generic mailbox". Use the function as the name ("Invoices, Customer BV"), leave job title and lifecycle stage empty, and exclude the label from contact counts and lead reports. Then everyone can see at a glance that this is not a person.
Never the primary contact of a deal
A deal needs a primary contact who can answer questions and move it forward. A generic mailbox cannot do that. If the only address you have for an open deal is info@, the deal is not yet qualified: the next step is to find the person who asked for the quote, not to send another email into a shared inbox.
Use it to find the real person
A generic address is a starting point. When someone replies from info@ and signs with their name, create that person as a contact, link them to the company and log the conversation there. Check first whether they already exist, the same way you would check an import for duplicates. Over time the generic contacts should shrink while real contacts grow.
Watch it in mailings and imports
Generic addresses need their own check before a mailing. The rules for marketing email can treat company mailboxes differently from personal addresses, and they differ per country, so keep the marketing email status on these records too and have the rules for your markets checked. During imports, filter on prefixes such as info@, sales@, office@ and invoices@ so they land as labelled records instead of fake people.
Clean up what is already there
Search the CRM for common prefixes and names like "Info" or "Sales". Move each address to its company where possible, label the ones that must stay as contacts, and replace generic primary contacts on open deals with the real person. If two records turn out to describe the same mailbox, let one of the people who are allowed to merge duplicates combine them.
How Pomio CRM supports it
In Pomio CRM contacts are linked to companies, so the generic address and the real people stay together. A fixed label marks generic mailboxes and makes them easy to filter out of lists and reports. Roles decide who may change records, and the audit log shows who changed what and when.
In short
Keep info@ and similar addresses on the company, label any that must be a contact as a generic mailbox, never use one as the primary contact of a deal, and use every generic address as a route to the real person.