RetentionBench

A research crawler. This page is what our user agent points at.

RetentionBench reads publicly available pages on Shopify storefronts to study how brands run their email marketing. It is operated by Synapse Retention (synapseretention.com).

Requests come from two machines in a datacentre in New York, not from Hungary, so an IP lookup will disagree with where we are. The operator is in Hungary. Each machine has fixed addresses and its own work:

• The crawler, scan.storeretention.com (178.128.147.141). It reads robots.txt and your homepage, and nothing else. It is the only machine that crawls stores.
• Mailing-list research, api.storeretention.com (167.99.228.228 and 2604:a880:400:d1:0:4:f473:8001). It reads the mail brands send to the addresses we subscribed to their lists between September and early October 2026, and since 7 October 2026 joins a list only with the brand’s permission. It loads no page of your site. It also reads copies of homepages from Common Crawl's public archive, which sends no request to your site. When a brand asks us to leave its list, it sends the one unsubscribe request that brand's own email names.

Our user agent is RetentionBench/1.0 (+https://storeretention.com/) and we do not disguise it, rotate it, or route around anything.

What it does

• Reads robots.txt before any other request to a host, and obeys it.
• Rate-limits per host, and backs off globally when asked to.
• Never retries a 429 during a run.
• Does not use residential proxies or rotate IP addresses. Each machine above keeps the addresses listed for it.

What it does not do

• It does not log in, create accounts, or bypass a password page.
• It does not add to cart, start a checkout, or complete any transaction.
• It does not attempt to defeat bot protection. If we are challenged, we stop.
• It does not collect personal data. See the privacy notice.

If one of our addresses is on your list

Addresses ending in @in.storeretention.com are ours too. We used them to subscribe to brands' mailing lists, and we read what the brands send. Since 7 October 2026, we only join a list with the brand’s permission. Lists we joined before then, we stay on until the brand asks us to leave. To have one removed, reply to any email we have sent you, or email bot@storeretention.com with your domain. It is off your list within 48 hours. If our address has never received an email from you, delete it from your list; we won't add it back.

To be excluded

Email bot@storeretention.com from any address, with the domain you want excluded. Exclusion requests are honoured within 48 hours and cover the whole registrable domain, including subdomains. No reason is required and we will not ask for one.

Exclusion is permanent and recorded in a version-controlled file, so it cannot be quietly undone later.

Privacy

The privacy notice sets out what we collect, the legal basis, and how to have it removed.

Last updated 7 October 2026.