Find public role emails (sales@, press@, support@) on a company website without guessing

Updated 14 Oct 2026 · Disclosure: the Contact Details Scraper linked below is an Unadhi product on the Apify Store. This guide is free, the manual method needs no tool at all, and the Apify method works with any contact scraper.

Why guessing is a bad idea

• It bounces. Many companies have no sales@, or route it to a ticket system with a different address. Bounced mail hurts your own sender reputation.
• It lands in the wrong place. A press question sent to support@ gets a ticket number, not a reply.
• It is unnecessary. If a company wants to hear from buyers, journalists or partners, it says where. Your job is to find that, not to invent it.

Step 1: decide which inbox you actually need

These are common naming habits, not rules. A company may use none of them. Only use an address you have actually seen published.

Step 2: check the pages where companies publish inboxes

• Footer of the homepage: many small companies list one general inbox there.
• Contact page (/contact, /contact-us, /kontakt): often split by department.
• About and press pages: press and partnership inboxes usually live here.
• Impressum or legal notice (/impressum, /legal, /mentions-legales): companies in Germany and Austria, for example, are generally required to publish an electronic contact address here.
• Privacy policy: under GDPR the controller's contact details must be given, so a privacy or data protection inbox often appears here.
• /.well-known/security.txt: a small text file (standard RFC 9116) with a Contact: line for security reports. Use it only for security issues.
• Careers page: a jobs@ or careers@ inbox, only for applications.

Two quick tricks: press Ctrl+F and search for @ on each page, and hover over "Email us" buttons to see the mailto: address behind them. Some sites show a form only; in that case the form is the published channel, so use it.

Step 3: write down only what is published

Keep a small sheet with one row per company:

Example rows only, to show the layout. Not real company data.

The "found on" column matters: it is your proof that the company published the address, and it lets you re-check later if the page changes. If the only address you can find is a person's name (for example firstname.lastname@), leave it out of this sheet. That is personal data and needs a separate, lawful reason.

Step 4: for a list of sites, run a contact scraper on Apify

Checking by hand is fine for five companies. For fifty, a contact-details Actor visits each homepage plus a few contact-like pages and collects the published addresses for you.

1. Create a free Apify account (no card needed for the free plan; see apify.com/pricing for the current monthly free usage).
2. Open the Contact Details Scraper: Emails, Phones, Socials and click Try for free. Current pricing is shown on that Store page.
3. Paste your company homepages. In JSON view a privacy-safe input looks like this:

{
  "urls": ["example-brand.com", "example-saas.io"],
  "maxPagesPerSite": 4,
  "includePersonalEmails": false,
  "includePersonProfiles": false,
  "respectRobotsTxt": true,
  "respectTermsOfService": true,
  "checkEmailMx": true,
  "defaultCountry": "IN"
}

• includePersonalEmails: false (the default) keeps only shared role mailboxes such as info@, sales@ and support@. Addresses that identify one person are dropped and only counted.
• maxPagesPerSite: 4 reads the homepage plus the most contact-like pages (contact, about, impressum, support). That is where role inboxes live, so more pages rarely add much.
• respectRobotsTxt and respectTermsOfService make the Actor skip pages a site disallows for bots and sites whose terms forbid automated access. Leave both on.
• checkEmailMx runs a free DNS check that the email's domain can receive mail.
• Set defaultCountry to your own country code so local phone numbers are read correctly.

Click Save & Start. You get one row per website with the emails found, the page each was found on, phones, social links and a status. Sites that blocked crawling come back as blocked-by-robots or blocked-by-terms: respect that and use the manual checklist or the site's contact form instead of trying another tool to get round it.

Already have a Google Maps or other business dataset on Apify? Pass its dataset ID instead of URLs; see enrich a Google Maps Apify dataset with emails and phones.

Step 5: check the result and use it one to one

• Export the dataset as CSV and open it next to your sheet from Step 3. Keep the page URL for every address.
• Drop anything that failed the MX check, and anything that looks like a person rather than a team.
• Pick one inbox per company that matches your reason for writing (Step 1). Do not send the same message to info@, sales@ and support@ at once.
• Write a short, specific, one-to-one message. A role inbox is not permission to add a company to a newsletter or a bulk sequence.

Common mistakes

• Treating the privacy@ or security@ inbox as a sales channel. Those exist for data requests and vulnerability reports only.
• Scraping marketplaces or social networks for seller contacts. Their terms usually forbid it; the Actor above skips them by design.
• Keeping an old list for months. Inboxes change; re-check the "found on" page before you write.

Related guides

• Enrich a Google Maps Apify dataset with emails and phones
• Contact Details Scraper: what it does and when to use it
• Copy-paste inputs for the Contact Details and Product scrapers
• Build a weekly competitor price sheet from Shopify stores (uses our E-commerce Product Scraper)

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Unadhi Guides are free, independent explainers. We correct errors as soon as we find them: write to mininglife7@gmail.com.