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Finding address

How to find an email address

"Desperately seeking…."

Some tips, but not the ultimate answer, to finding an email address.

Email addresses change. People move companies. Servers go out of business and people move countries. Kids leave college and servers shut down unused accounts. You will know if you have the wrong email, because it will be returned to you with an obscure or positively misleading message from a mail server.

There is no central email address book or the equivalent of the phone company directory enquiry service. To make such a master email directory complete, every organization that provides email service for its members would have to submit all additions or removals to a master list. This would be an admin nightmare and such a valuable marketing resource that it is never going to happen.

Spam is also a problem, as those with Hotmail accounts know. It is so cheap to send mass e-mailings there is no longer the cost barrier presented by the postal service. After all, mailing addresses are all in the public domain and listed in directories.

On the Internet, if you want to find an email address, you have to do it yourself. There are many web tools to help but there is no guarantee of success.

There are many different ways to track down people on the web. Start with the obvious methods:

If you have received an email from someone then you must have their email address.

	The *reply-to* address is part of the message
	Some users send with one email address but provide a separate *reply-to*. The email software takes care of this.

The email address is often hidden as the sender has thoughtfully provided you with a meaningful name which ‘hides’ the email address. The following are common and legitimate:

	The straight email address.
	The person’s name or nickname.
	The name or nickname followed by the email address or vice versa with the address itself inside <>.
	What the sender sees depends upon the server and the way the user has set up their email account.
	Email (client) server software understands the rules and will extract the email address from any alias, so it is safe to cut and paste the *From* line to the To of your new email if you do not want to use *reply.*

Look in your address book.

	It will normally store the address of anybody you have sent something to or replied to.
	If it doesn’t do this, check your settings. Make sure you keep a backup, perhaps a periodic printout just to make sure.

Ask friends.

If the simple methods fail, then move on to some sleuthing:

Detective work

If you already know something about the background of the person you are looking for, you could search for them on the web.

	Most universities provide a searchable email address list
	Many businesses list their staff by job title such as sales@ etc.

Some sites specialise in collecting interest, professional and educational lists:

http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_lookup_specialist.htm

http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_lookup_regional.htm

If you want your email to be forwarded to you, you can ask one of the forwarding services to do this.

http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_coa.htm

http://www.switchemail.com/pages/index.asp

There are some other web search engines that specialise in tracking down people

People Finder and Search Aids section of Yahoo.

Mesa - MetaEmailSearchAgent based at the University of Hanover in Germany

Switchboard is another good search engine but with a commercial rather than a personal bias.

From Lycos WhoWhere?

eMailman site has lists of the public Ph and LDAP and directories which might work for some large organisations.

If it is a celebrity you are looking for, you could search the Web looking for their official site. If you ask a sensible question they might well reply.

All4oneSearch looks at all the search engines which makes it very good for complex, word searches.

Google and Ego-Surf provide excellent word search engines

Yahoo has a good category index

Metacrawler is another good search engine to find names

Put any name you are hunting for in quotes. If you don't, you might find pages that have the first name and the last name but not the two together.

Guess

Lay ego-surfing bait by maintaining a website and announcing it to some of the word-search engines.

Digging Deeper

The web provides some useful tools to search for website owners and the owners of web address. If you extract the IP address by double clicking on an email for example you can type it into one of the many 'whois' searches. Such searches will yield a variable amount of information. They might yield the email address but they should show you which server sent the message to you.

	Whois
	Whois source
	whatismyipaddress.com

Summary

To find a friend's email address, you can:

	Find your friend's address in a message that they sent you
	Ask your friend for their address
	Look in a directory
	Search the web

Some final thoughts

	Don’t confuse somebody who might not be the intended recipient, so keep any initial enquiry email simple. Don’t announce your pregnancy or reveal yourself as a love child.
	When all else fails, resort to some inspired guessing. The worst that can happen is the mail will bounce.
	Respect people’s rights to privacy. The person or writer you want to communicate with might not want to hear from you.
	And if you don’t want to be contacted, don’t reply.