How Do You Know What Address to Send It To?

How Do You Know What Address to Send It To?

Just as you wouldn't drop an envelope into a mailbox without a complete address on it, you can't expect your e-mail to reach its destination if you don't know the correct address to send it to.

The best way to find out someone's e-mail address is the same as the best way to find out their regular mailing address: ask them. Remember that there are other communications media, like the telephone too! Just pick up the phone, call the potential recipient, and ask for the e-mail address. If you have the person's business card, the e-mail address may be listed there.

If phoning is not an option, there are other ways to look up e-mail addresses on the Internet, although none of them are perfect. If you know that the person is a member of the same online service as you, use that service's Search feature to search for the member name. On America Online use the Members, Member Directory command; on CompuServe, use Mail, Member Directory.

If you don't know what service the recipient uses, you can try an address lookup site on the World Wide Web.

Deciphering E-Mail Addresses

An e-mail address looks like this: name@address. The "name" portion is the person's unique user name on whatever system they are using. For instance, mine is fwempen, a combination of my first initial (Faithe) and my last name (Wempen). Then after the @ sign is the domain name, the address of the system you use. In my case it's iquest.net.

Some addresses may have many words separated by periods after the @ sign, such as carla@newriders.mcp.com. Generally, such addresses read from most specific down to most general; for instance, in that example, "carla" is in the "editorial" department at "nrp" (New Riders Publishing), which is a division of "mcp" (Macmillan Computer Publishing), which is a "com" (commercial).type of site.