Finding someones email address

It’s often the case that people use the internet to make contact with old connections or people they’ve just lost touch with. There are various ways of doing this and this article explores whether using email alone is the best way of finding long lost friends and relations.

There’s a lot of talk about something called 6 degrees of separation at present. If we multiply our exiting connections by 6, we probably have someone we can claim connection with. Alex knows Bob, Bob knows Charles, Charles knows David, David knows Edna, Edna knows Frank who knows Donald Trump!

However, you cannot rely on 6 degrees of separation as a reliable idea. But if you persevere you can have a degree of success in finding people, simply by using an email address, rather than searching the web.

Firstly, if you have any social networking site memberships, use the contacts there to ask if anyone can help you find someone. For every 100 friends you have on a networked site, just one email can generate at least a few results.

From your existing address book, just highlight any address you need and mail a request for assistance, and you’ll get help tracing this. It may well be that this simply generates some ‘People finder’ websites, which is not actually finding people by email alone, but email will certainly kickstart the process of finding them.

Remember though, however you search, that some people may not wish to be found, so they have taken care to ensure that they do not have a widely known email address and are not registered with any networking sites, nor do they have their contact details on any websites, or maybe they just have a new email address. If this is the case, they remain hidden and you just need to accept their privacy is something beyond your control.

However, when you want to locate people, email is a great method (but email alone may not be the best method). Using a combination of sites for search, people finding and social networking will give you the very best results. You should never use 6 degrees of separation alone – you need to use everything you can to find someone.