Tips on how to find an E-mail address
by ANDY WALKER
Southam News
August 1998

Let's say you're looking for a friend's E-mail address. They are not answering the one you have and you are not getting a message back saying that the letter failed to deliver. Is there some place you can look to find them in case they've changed their address or to verify that the one you have is correct?

While E-mail is the most commonly used tool on the Internet, it's surprisingly frustrating to use when you run into this type of problem. This is because there's no huge E-mail directory on the Net. So you're stuck with a bit of detective work.

First, here's some basic things to check about their address to be certain that you haven't mistyped it.

All Internet E-mail addresses follow these rules:
1. There are no spaces.
2. There are always two parts, divided by an @ sign.

Once you've determined that the address has no obvious typos the next step can go in any number of directions. Let say your friend's E-mail account is bob@xyz.com. Is xyz.com Bob's workplace? If it is you could try surfing to www.xyz.com to see if the company has a Web page. There may be a directory on there that lists employees. If there's no E-mail list, try to find an administrative E-mail address and send them an E-mail asking if they could try to find Bob's address for you.

After that, an E-mail directory service should be your next step.

I always start with Four11. There's a form at this E-mail directory where you can type in the person's first and last name and domain if you know it. For Bob the domain would be xyz.com.

The next place I like to check is Bigfoot. It uses the same basic search principles as Four11. They also have an advanced search feature and a search FAQ, which is useful for answers to frequent questions. Also check out their search tips section for tips on how to effectively search the BigFoot directory.

Some people sign up for free E-mail services such as Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo's free E-mail service. Both services offer E-mail directories of their users, though if someone has told a service not to list their address you won't find it. These are good places to look as often people will register secondary E-mail addresses for personal use.

And then there's search engines.

While search engines like Lycos and Excite are good places to find Web pages, they also have areas to search for people. Try Lycos' People Find feature "at" and Excite's E-mail lookup.

Also try Hotbot's E-mail search. For addresses in Europe you might try MESA, the Meta-Email Search Agent, which queries directories both in Europe and North America.

Of course, if all this fails, you could always call your friend on the phone, assuming you have his or her phone number. But what fun would that be?

Internet Course Outline ... Getting Started with e-mail