Business email address examples: what to put before the @

For most small businesses the best address is your first name at your own domain, like [email protected], plus one general address such as info@ or hello@ for the website and printed material. A team adds one address per person in the same pattern, and a few role addresses like billing@ or jobs@ that land in whoever's inbox handles that job. You rarely need more than one paid mailbox per person: the rest can be free aliases.

The common patterns, with examples

Here are the names that work, using a made-up plumbing company at riverplumbing.com.

Person addresses

firstname@ — [email protected]. Short, friendly, easy to say on the phone. The usual pick for a business with a handful of people.
firstname.lastname@ — [email protected]. Clear and formal, common in offices and practices. Longer to spell out loud.
first initial + last name@ — [email protected]. Works well when two people share a first name. Harder for a customer to guess.

Pick one pattern and use it for everybody. Mixing mike@ with sarah.jones@ looks like nobody planned it.

Role addresses

info@ or hello@ — the general address for the website, the van, the business card. hello@ reads a bit warmer; info@ is the one people guess.
office@ — good for a trade where one person answers the phone and the inbox for everyone.
billing@ or accounts@ — invoices and payments, so they do not get lost among quotes.
jobs@ or careers@ — applications, kept away from customer mail.
orders@ or bookings@ — for a shop, a restaurant or a salon taking requests by email.
service@ or quotes@ — for a trade that wants estimate requests in one place.

A role address keeps working when people change. If your office manager leaves, office@ simply starts landing in someone else's inbox, and customers never notice.

Which to use for a one-person business

If you are the business, you need one mailbox, usually your first name. Then decide what goes on the website and the truck.

Your name (mike@) tells customers they reach the owner directly. Many trades and practices win work exactly because of that.
A general address (info@ or office@) looks bigger and is easier to hand over later if you hire help or sell the business.

A sensible setup is both: mike@ as your mailbox, with info@ as an alias that arrives in the same inbox. Put info@ on the website, use mike@ when you write to someone yourself.

Which to use for a small team

For three to ten people:

One mailbox per person, in the same pattern (firstname@ is the easiest).
One general address, info@ or office@, delivered to whoever answers enquiries. Some providers can send it to two people at once.
Role addresses only where a job really exists: billing@ if one person does the books, jobs@ only while you are hiring.

Resist a long list of role addresses nobody watches. An address on your website that nobody reads is worse than no address at all.

What looks odd to customers

Numbers and nicknames: mike1978@, plumbingguy@, thebestplumber@. Fine for a personal account, not on an invoice.
Your business name repeated: [email protected]. It reads twice and adds nothing.
Very long addresses: michael.anthony.taylor.office@. Customers have to type it, sometimes on a phone.
Hard-to-spell words: if you have to spell it out every time you say it, choose something plainer.
Hyphens and underscores: mike_taylor@ is easy to mistype as mike.taylor@ or miketaylor@. A dot is the safest separator if you want one.
A free email address on the van: [email protected]. It works, but customers see a business that does not own its name. Why a business email on your own domain matters goes through that trade-off.

How many addresses you actually need

Count people, not names. Each person who reads and writes their own mail needs a mailbox, a real inbox with its own password, and mailboxes are usually what you pay for each month. Everything else can be an alias, an extra name that delivers into an existing mailbox at no extra charge with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

A typical small business ends up with something like:

2 mailboxes: mike@ and sarah@
4 aliases: info@ and quotes@ into Sarah's inbox, billing@ and jobs@ into Mike's

That is six addresses for the price of two.

How aliases work in practice

In Google Workspace, an admin opens the person's account in the Admin console and adds an "alternate email address". Mail to that name arrives in their Gmail. They can also reply from it once they add it under "Send mail as" in their Gmail settings.
In Microsoft 365, an admin opens the user in the admin center and adds another email address under the account's aliases.
If several people must share one inbox and see each other's replies, a shared mailbox (Microsoft) or a group (Google) suits better than an alias.

Your provider's admin help has the current clicks; the labels change from time to time, so follow theirs rather than any screenshot.

Names to set up even if you rarely use them

Two addresses are worth having from day one, pointed at the owner's inbox:

The address you sign up for accounts with, such as admin@ or accounts@. Use it for your domain registrar, your website, your Google Business Profile and your payment processor. If staff change, that address still belongs to the business and password resets still reach you. Keeping your website and domain logins safe explains why this matters.
A catch for common misspellings, if your provider allows it, so mail to "inf0@" or "offce@" is not lost. Use this sparingly: a catch-all that accepts any name also collects spam.

Before you choose: the domain part

Everything after the @ is your domain, and it matters more than the name before it. Keep it short and the same as your website. If you have not set up mail on it yet, how to set up a business email address walks through the provider choice and the settings, and email forwarding vs a real mailbox helps if you only want one address delivered to an inbox you already have.

What to do this week

Write down every person who needs their own mailbox.
Pick one pattern for person addresses and stick to it.
Choose your public address (info@, hello@ or office@) and decide whose inbox it lands in.
Add billing@, jobs@ or quotes@ only where someone will read them.
Set up the extra names as aliases, not extra mailboxes.
Say each address over the phone once to test it.
Update the address on your website, cards and invoices so they all match.

If your website still shows an old Gmail or Hotmail address and the site itself feels dated, you can see your site rebuilt first with the new address on its contact page.