Someone tweeted this question to one of my colleagues, and after discussing it, I decided it was too long to answer in a tweet, and worth posting to my blog to benefit others, so now there's a URL to forward!

Q:  Doesn't Google have a feature to find email addresses, say I wanted to find an email address for someone at Amazon, what would I do?

A: No, not specifically.  Google doesn't want to make it that easy for spambots and mail harvesters to bombard random people with e-commerce solicitations (it happens enough already).

However, even though there’s no single perfect free method, since it appears you know the person’s name, you can try any of the following on Google or your favorite search engine:

“firstname lastname” *@amazon.com

Lastname *@amazon.com (Russ Moon recommended this one because some people use initials rather than full name)

“firstname lastname” “amazon dot com”

“firstname lastname” amazon (email OR contact)

Or use Google Groups (http://groups.google.com) and search using

author:”firstname lastname”

which will turn up any newsgroup posts made by that person, and if you click the View Profile link next to their name in the from: field of any message results, it will generate an image challenge prompt, which once entered, will display their email address.

Normally, it’s easy enough to email firstname.lastname@company.com and bcc: firstname_lastname@company.com and firstinitialLastname@company.com and whichever of those doesn’t bounce back is the right one.

However, Amazon is one of the relatively few but growing number of companies (notably along with Yahoo, Google and Microsoft) that doesn’t follow a standard email address convention, so it may not be guessable this way.

Ryan Leary also recommended these variants (using pharma giant Merck for his examples). Substitute your locations, titles, area codes, etc., in the following:

Mailto: "@merck.com" (philadelphia | wayne) (Vice OR VP) (215 OR 484 OR 610)

"email * merck.com" (this is for Google only, given use of asterisk as wildcard, and the next one is even more targeted)

("mailto * merck.com" OR "email * @merck.com") "senior scientist" (atlanta OR georgia OR ", GA")

Note:  The first two strings in this post can be problematic in that they will also display results that have www.amazon.com as well as email addresses, but hopefully the person name you include won't be too common and you won't have to sift through too many irrelevant results to get to the good ones.