How to Get Others' E-mail Addresses

Module NA14c

Contents

Audience and Objectives

About this document...

Overview

There is no simple directory or query system - Internet is too big and changes too rapidly for that. There are several strategies for finding addresses.

The World Wide Web has the best selection of tools for finding people. They fall into two broad categories:

This module will focus on the name-finding services, and will touch more briefly on the general search services.

If the methods discussed here don't work, your best method of finding an individual's e-mail address may be to phone or write by "snail-mail."

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The Privacy Issue

Just as many people prefer not to have their names, addresses, and phone numbers listed in the telephone directory, so many individuals and organizations do not make their email addresses available to search services.

In order for a search service to find someone's address, his or her Internet Service Provider, business, or college must take specific steps to make it available. Many organizations don't do that, either because that task has low priority, or because they fear privacy of members will be violated. Recent (1997-8) court cases between America Online and companies that do bulk email advertizing have underlined the need for caution.

The result is that only a small fraction of actual email addresses are available through search services.


 

Name-Finder Services

With all these services, you go to the Web site for the service and fill in a simple information request form. Pressing <Enter> or clicking on the Submit button starts the database search. All are quite rapid, and return a list of possible candidates (if any were found) or a suggestion-filled help message if nothing was found.

At the present time, there are three major name-finder services:

WhoWhere 

WhoWhere, which is part of the Lycos search engine, can give you either email addresses or physical address and phone numbers. If you want to be found, you can register and provide additional information.

Try WhoWhere now...

Four11/Yahoo 

Four11, in conjunction with Yahoo (a well-know general search and classification service) offers both e-mail and telephone-address searches.

Try Four11 now...

Switchboard 

Switchboard is an address and telephone-book service, and also provides e-mail lookup.

Try Switchboard now...

Infospace 

In addition to finding people's address, phone numbers and email, you can do reverse-lookup - using a phone number to identify a person, or entering  a street address to find out who lives there. Infospace also has a business directory, a government directory, lists from several European countries, and a gateway to access US government public records about individuals.

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General Search Services

Any of the Internet search services can be used to search for individual names. If you use a service with a large database that includes the text of all Web pages, you will very often find the names, and fairly often the e-mail addresses of the people you search for. Telephone and street addresses are much more of a rarity on these general services.

The two services reputedly having the largest databases are Alta Vista and HotBot. Hint: When searching for first and last names, put them "In Quotes"!

Try Alta Vista now... http://www.altavista.com/ Alta Vista Search

Try HotBot now...http://www.hotbot.com/ 

For more information about doing Web serches, see module W12c.

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Audience:

This is intended to help people who want to find e-mail addresses of others. It assumes a basic knowledge of e-mail, and refers to the World Wide Web.

Objectives

When you successfully complete this lesson, you will be able to... Return to Contents of this document

About this document...

Module NA14c: How to Get Others' E-mail Addresses

Author:
Laurence J. Krieg
Institution:
Department of Computer Information Systems, Washtenaw Community College
History:
Original: 9 February 1996

Major revision 29 May 1996; Minor revision 21 January 1999.

Sponsored in part by CoNDUIT

CoNDUIT is a registered service mark of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.CoNDUIT is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under Cooperative Agreement No.DE-FC05-94OR22341, as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Technology Reinvestment Project. Statements contained on these pages do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Energy, ARPA, or the U.S. Government.

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