Five places, about nine minutes, one rule: write to a person, not a mailbox. Look at the contact and about pages, then the team page, then the footer and policy pages, then the page source, then run a search on the company's domain. Stop at the first named person you find, and verify the address before you send.
Most guides on this topic jump to tools that scrape. This page stays with publicly posted addresses, found by hand, because that is allowed, accurate and quick for the dozens of companies most small businesses are really trying to reach. The example is Tamarack Industrial Supply, a fictional distributor of safety gloves and cutting tools at tamarack.example, and the person looking is a rep who wants to reach its purchasing manager.
You want an address that reaches someone who can make a decision, ideally a named person with a role that fits what you sell. A shared mailbox such as info@ is a fallback, not the goal. If you only know the company and not the person, start with finding decision-makers at a company and come back.
Place 1: contact and about pages (1 minute)
Open the Contact page and the About page. Look for any address written out in text. Many sites hide behind a form, in which case the address isn't there, and you move on after one minute. Small businesses often post an owner's direct address on the About page, in a line such as "email Ed at ed@tamarack.example." Note whatever you find and where.
Place 2: team pages and bios (2 minutes)
Search for a Team, People, Leadership or Staff page. These list names and titles, and sometimes a clickable email. Hover over a name or an envelope icon to see whether it holds an address. Even when the page gives no addresses, you now have names and titles, which is half the job. Tamarack's page lists "Divya Patel, Purchasing Manager," with no email.
Place 3: footers, press and policy pages (2 minutes)
Scroll to the footer, then open the Press or News page, any recent press release, the careers page, and the Privacy and Terms pages. Press releases end with a media contact, often a person with a direct address. Job postings name a recruiter. Privacy pages list a contact for data requests, which is a role address but is real and read. A press release on Tamarack's news page ends: "Media contact: Ed Marsh, ed.marsh@tamarack.example." Now you have a pattern: first.last.
Place 4: the page source (2 minutes)
Some addresses are in the page but not visible. Open the page, press Ctrl+U on Windows or Option+Cmd+U on a Mac, then search the code for "mailto:" and for "@". If the page is built with JavaScript and the source looks empty, open the browser's developer tools, go to the Elements panel and search there. Addresses written as "name [at] domain [dot] com" are meant to dodge spam; read them as they are, and decide whether the owner really wants unsolicited mail.
Place 5: a search on the domain (2 minutes)
Search Google for site:tamarack.example "@tamarack.example". It returns every indexed page of the site that mentions an address, including old PDFs, newsletters and blog posts. Add filetype:pdf to look inside documents only. Our companion piece on finding leads on Google with search operators goes through the other operators, and for a person known only from a profile, finding an email address from a LinkedIn profile uses the same pattern method.
Write down where each address came from. Tamarack's row reads: company Tamarack Industrial Supply, person Divya Patel, title Purchasing Manager, address divya.patel@tamarack.example (guessed from the press release pattern), source news page, date, verified yes or no. The source column matters a month later, when an address bounces and you need to know whether it was posted or guessed.
Role addresses versus people
A role address names a function: info@, sales@, support@, contact@, hello@, office@, orders@, billing@, careers@. A person address names someone: divya.patel@, dpatel@, divya@. Role addresses are shared. They may be read by several people, filtered hard, or by an assistant who cannot say yes. They can still be right, in two cases: a very small business where the owner reads info@, and a function that really does sit in a mailbox, like orders@ for a purchasing question. A small business that lists a Gmail address on its site is usually the owner's own inbox.
If you find one person address at a company, the rest follow the same pattern, usually. Ed Marsh is ed.marsh@, so Divya Patel is probably divya.patel@tamarack.example. That is a guess, not a finding, so treat it as unverified.
If nine minutes turn up nothing
Some sites really don't publish a person's address, and you shouldn't spend an hour on one. Three fallbacks, in order. Call the main line and ask: "I'd like to send some information to Divya Patel in purchasing. What's the best email for her?" Receptionists share this more often than you would think. Use the contact form with a short, specific message addressed to her by name, so whoever reads it can forward it. Or find her profile and connect there, then go to the LinkedIn route. Mark the row "not found" with the date and move on. A list of 40 companies with 25 good addresses is a better day's work than 40 minutes on one stubborn site.
Verify before you send
Run any address you have not seen working through a verification check, and pay attention to "catch-all" results, which can't be confirmed. Bounces hurt your sender reputation in Gmail. Verifying email addresses before sending explains the options. As to the law, in the US CAN-SPAM applies to commercial email whatever the address source: accurate From and subject lines, your physical address, and a working opt-out. It also treats automated harvesting of addresses from sites that state they don't share them as an aggravated violation, which is one more reason to collect by hand and stay with business addresses. If you are not sure, ask a lawyer.
Nine minutes is fine for twenty companies and slow for two hundred. Building a prospect list for free shows the hand method at scale, and finding a business owner's email address covers small shops. Rocketship does the lookup for you: it finds the buyers by name with a verified email, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. See the AI workers. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required.