Good morning Nicki!
While it is sometimes possible to locate a person's name and address
using only their e-mail address, there is no 100% foolproof way of
doing so. Online directory listings depend largely on whether or not
the owner of the email address has registered with a given directory,
whether someone else has registered them, or whether they've been
careful to keep identifying information off the interent.
It's a little easier to determine contact information for a business,
if they own their own domain name, so lets start there.
Say for a moment you have a letter from someone@google.com . Your
first step would be to find out who owns the name "google.com". You
can do this by looking up the domain name in WHOIS. I prefer NetSol's
WHOIS for such lookups:
NetSol WHOIS
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois
Pop the domain into the WHOIS search, and you'll find:
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-258879)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
...followed by much more information, including technical contact
phone numbers and occasionally fax numbers.
This method sometimes works for private individuals as well, if they
own a domain name and haven't used a false address (many change their
contact information to a "dummy" address after they've registered a
domain for privacy reasons).
For private individuals, there are a number of methods you can try.
Most common is to simply use Google to search on the email address.
Sometimes results will link the email address to the name and street
address of the owner, if they've published them together in a publicly
accessible personal profile.
If the email address is from a free email provider like Yahoo or
Hotmail, try looking it up in the service's "Member Directory".
Or, you can try a reverse email lookup:
Netscape Reverse Lookup
http://www.netscape.com/netcenter/whitereverse.html?cp=tec_1b
Internet Address Finder
http://www.iaf.net/
InfoSpace
http://ypng.infospace.com/info/ypv3/reverse.htm?&fromform=revphone
SearchBug
http://www.searchbug.com/peoplefinder/peoplebyemail1.asp
Use of these tools does not guarantee that you will be able to
find the person to whom any given e-mail address belongs.
If they have taken care not to publicly associate any personal
information with
their e-mail address, have unlisted telephone numbers or have been
certain to have their listings removed from all public directories,
these tools may not help.
Good luck!
--Missy
Search terms: [ "find people" email ] |
