How to find somebody's email address

• Query the usenet-addresses WAIS database
  If you are in luck, the person whose email address you seek has posted an article on usenet within the past year, in which case a record of their name and email address will be found in this database. Just use their name as a query.

• Visit the World Wide Web server at their site
  
  • Look for it in the list of registered servers
  Many sites are now on the web. If you know at what institution the person works, you should try to visit their WWW server. Somewhere on that server you may find a phone directory or other information about personnel or faculty.

• Visit the Gopher server at their site
  
  • Look for it in the list of known gopher servers
  Proceed as above.

• Consult The InterNIC
  
  • In particular, the White Pages
  For example, try Netfind with queries of the form name institution, or name hostname. Take the time to read their documentation.

  The InterNIC maintains information on basically everything on the internet. It consists of 3 organizations: Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) provides registration services, AT&T provides directory and database services, and General Atomics/CERFnet provides information services.

• Talk to Fred, a friendly interface to X.500 - The telnet connection no longer seems to start up properly. Perhaps it would be best to install xfred instead.
  • fred at wp.psi.com
  • fred at wp2.psi.com

• Knowbot Information Services: an experimental white pages automated agent that knows how to contact and query other services on your behalf. Highly recommended!

• If you know the institution but have not found a registered site
  • you can try to guess a URL of the form http://cs.university.ca, http://www.university.ca, gopher://cs.university.ca, or gopher://gopher.university.ca. It helps to know a valid host name.
  • If you know or can guess a valid host name, you could try to finger them.
  • or you could try to query their mail server (SMTP) and ask it to verify your guess at an email address. Try the person's name or first name or guess their user id.
  • you could try to send email to postmaster@site, where site is a valid internet address for the organization in question, and ask for assistance.

• If you know the institution, but not its internet address.
  Visit the InterNIC (see earlier entry).

• If you do not know the institution
  Use whatever information is available to you to cross-reference with another information source. If, for example, the only reference you have is the title of a paper and the name of the author, try to look for this author, this paper, or another paper by the same author in one of the on-line databases. See How to find techreports for further information.

• Read the FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses