Finding e-Mail Addresses on the Internet
Why is it a problem ?
E-mail address allocation is very dynamic and volatile. You have one home telephone number which may change once every seven years when you move house. But e-mail addresses can be created, and terminated, at will and it is not unusual for people to have several e-mail addresses and only ever check half of them. Company allocated addresses change as people change position and firms that maintain their own domains tend to "over create", often just because they can! Change city and you change one home telephone number, but you may be adding several new e-mail addresses and abandoning several others. The ISP business can also be volatile and when an ISP goes belly up there may be another 50000 or so people sprouting new e-mail addresses as their domains change.
So, easy proliferation and no standard, central allocating of user-names (the part before the @) means that no organised telephone directory systems exist. So, what do you do to find someone?
Start with the Country
Directory services (Hey, where there's traffic there's money to be made with ads) have been developed to cope with these needs and people (who want to be found) offer up their addresses freely. And so should you (if you want to be found). Almost all directory services promise confidentiality and it is unlikely that you will end up on spammers mailing lists through your submissions to directories. But we digress (get the point - register).
United States
If you are looking for someone with an American address, then the best place to start would be with Four 11 which is one of the oldest US based e-mail directories. It also stores many UK addresses in its mainly US listing of 12 million addresses which are gleaned from voluntary submissions, newsgroup postings and ISP notifications.
Four 11 is considered to be the primary reference directory for e-mail addresses if you wish to be listed and if you want to be found on a worldwide basis. But you might rather just want to be on a local listing (city or national) and leave it at that.
Next to try would be Who? Where? which is also very US-centric.
The venerable Yahoo Directory also has a feature called "People Search" and you might turn up a hard to find address here.
At this point, if nothing has been found, turn to the ReadWell e-Mail Directories which will link you to e-Mail Directories "by country". And this is where you can start plugging your search at the smaller and regional directories in a last ditch effort. This is a relatively new venture and users are adding new e-mail directories regularly which makes this a useful resource for searching for anyone, anywhere.
United Kingdom and Europe
Hmmmm. Good point. Anyone have any suggestions?
South Africa
Ananzi
Durban e-Mail Directory
ReadWell suggestions?
Other Internet Resources on Finding e-Mail Address
Finding an e-Mail Address
Masha Boitchouk's very extensive site. Highly recommended. Hosted by School of Information & Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Your Response & Comments would be appreciated .....
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