Finding people by email

More and more people use the net to locate those people they used to know but have lost contact 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.

One popular idea at the moment is called “six degrees of separation”. If you take all the people you know, and add the people THEY know, and so on for 6 rounds, that’s a huge database of contacts to investigate. Alex knows Bob, Bob knows Charles, Charles knows David, David knows Edna, Edna knows Frank who knows Donald Trump!

However the 6 degrees of separation is at best tenuous. 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.

Initially, a message to your social networking site friends/contacts is a good place to start looking for someone. If you know say 100 people on a networking site, an email to them all could help you find valuable data.

From your existing address book, just highlight any address you need and mail a request for assistance, and you’ll get help tracing this. All you get may be people finder sites, but these will at least give a start – even if they are not really email methods of finding someone.

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 so, they will stay hidden and their privacy will be (rightly) respected.

But when you need someone’s address, email is good as a starting point – even if there are better methods. It’s best to use all 3 methods – people finders, social networking sites and web search – that way you have the best chance of success. You need to use all the means you can to search, not just six degrees of separation.