Hi there tupelo,
Welcome back to GA.
As you probably know, Google researchers are not allowed to post
personal information about living people on the GA service. That,
however, does not mean we can't provide a road map for our clients
look up publicly available information on their own.
Email addresses are often, but not always, easy to acquire. I once
sent an email to John Nash, of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, at Princeton
University to ask his opinion of the Ron Howard movie (the email
bounced for predictable reasons, but it was fun trying). Not all email
addresses are available, but with minimal information, you frequently
can find what you're looking for. Do keep in mind that most free
Internet email and telephone number lookup services have a
significant lag time between acquisition of a number/email address and
directory availability.
You did not state in your question what information you have available
for search purposes, so I'll make the assumption that it includes city
and state (I'll say more below about what to do if that's not the
case). As highroute-ga pointed out in a comment, there are a number of
websites available to do email searches. Yahoo! is probably the best
of them, but it is far from the only one. Here's a list of the one's I
think most useful (and with fewer popup ads than some of the other
choices):
Yahoo!
http://people.yahoo.com/
Switchboard
http://www.switchboard.com/bin/cgiemail.dll?LNK=14:11&MEM=1
WhoWhere - Lycos
http://www.whowhere.lycos.com/
Usenet Addresses Database (this service allows you to search for
e-mail addresses if you know the name of a person, or the name of the
organization that provides their net access.)
http://usenet-addresses.mit.edu/
Bigfoot
http://search.bigfoot.com/SEARCH
The strategy for using the sites above is simply to go through them
one by one, supply as much information as you have available, and see
if you get a likely "hit". If you do, you'll want to send a
confirmation email to be sure. You may very well come up with multiple
"possibles". If you can't narrow the list down further, simply send a
confirmation email to all on the list.
Now, let's say you're not sure what city the person you're looking for
lives in, but you do know their state. Try this - go to USSearch.com,
enter the name, state, and approximate age, and you will get a list of
possibilities which will include actual ages (for confirmation
purposes) and cities of residence. With a little deductive reasoning,
this should get you the city you need to use in the email searches
discussed above.
USSearch
http://teaser.ussearch.com/teaser/teaser.jsp?fc=NRNC2&TID=&srcAdID=2110022239&sourceid=&searchState=TX&searchCity=carrol
Perhaps you know the sought-after person's previous email address? If
that's the case, there are several sites that keep track of old email
addresses. Since these sites use information provided voluntarily by
people who want to be sure their forwarding information is publicly
available, not everyone will be listed on them, but, just in case,
here's a website that has a list of several of these "old email
address" database sites: http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_coa.htm
If you have gotten to this point and still haven't found the desired
address, check out this website by Joan Korenman, Director of the
Center for Women and Information Technology, and Professor of English
at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This site has some of
the things I've already included above plus a few other tips that it
didn't make sense for me to reiterate here:
http://www-unix.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/addresses.html
Keep in mind that Korenman's information about the "finger" feature is
largely obsolete due to privacy concerns, but most of the rest of her
information is solid and useful.
I wish you luck in your search. If you run into problems using my
suggestions or any of the links I provided, use the "Clarify Answer"
feature to let me know you need more assistance and I'll get right
back to you.
Thanks for your question,
ericynot-ga |
