How To Find E-Mail Addresses and Their Owners

Being able to instantly find someone on the internet is very useful. You can get in contact with old friends or acquaintances relatively easily. You can find out the identity of someone if they're harassing you as long as you know their e-mail. Plus, it's always impressive to clients when you get in contact with them before they've even give all of their details. Lastly you can use it to verify a person's contact information to be sure of who you are dealing with. Having this information prior to a transaction is vital to avoid potential losses and minimize risk.

This guide has been compiled to give you a quick rundown of the whole process. Do note that there are much more efficient, faster, and more accurate ways out there. This is a simple overview.

Search Engines

This is the most basic way, but garners excellent results. Simply use a search engine of your choice and enter your client's full name. It is also wise to enter a unique feature such as a pet's name, hobby, friends' names, or best of all profession or organization into the search. This will help the search engine to separate from all the duplicate names out there.

This will usually work because many people have blogs, or websites of their own. They can also be a part of communities where their e-mail is present.

Simply Guess It!

This sounds simple but it works. Organizations usually assign their clients simple e-mails such as johndoe@company.com, doe@company.com, jdoe@company.com, doe.john@company.com, or john@company.com. Try a few of these in a search engine to see if you get any relevant organizations to the person you are looking for. Vertical search engines such as Zoominfo solely store people, companies, and their relationships. You can try these to see if the person you are looking for has been indexed.

Run A Reverse Lookup

Free services such as Emailfinder allow you to reverse look-up an e-mail address to determine its owner. These services automatically search public records, phone book sources, and other databases for the owner's identity of any e-mail address. These searches can also be used to find or verify addresses such as zip codes, states, cities, or streets.

Harassment or Threats

Please note that if somebody is harassing or threating you over the internet, do not take it lightly. Ask them to stop. If they refuse, as long as you know their e-mail address, you have a good chance of finding them. Assuming you do know their e-mail address, do not be afraid to contact the person's e-mail service provider. Even free services such as Gmail or Hotmail will help you if you get in contact with one of their agents. They could provide documents or logs to forward to the authorities.

To get in contact with the service provider, look at the domain (the part after the @). Visit their website and look for "contact us". All e-mail providers keep IP Address logs which can be traced back to the original internet service provider, who can then identify the individual.

Social Networks

Search for the person or e-mail address on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. In this day and age almost everyone is on one social network or another. A simple search on these can reveal a lot.

National Whitepages

Try to check other countries' Whitepages. Here is a simple list of countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Brazil
• Denmark
• Germany
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Israel
• South Africa
• Sweden
• Switzerland