Role-based email address
A role-based address belongs to a function rather than a person — info@, sales@, contact@, hello@. It is usually a shared inbox, and for local business outreach it is often the only address published.
The conventional advice is to avoid them, and for enterprise selling that is right: info@ at a 4,000-person company reaches a queue nobody owns. For a six-person clinic or an independent agency, info@ reaches the owner, because the owner is the person reading it.
So the rule is about company size, not address shape. Below roughly twenty employees, treat a role address as a real inbox and write to it like a person. Above that, treat it as a fallback worth trying only when you have nothing better.
One practical caveat: some sending platforms suppress role addresses automatically and some deliverability tools count them against you. Know which of those apply to your stack before building a list that is mostly info@.
Goes deeper: How to Find Business Emails from Google Maps