|
|||||
Telephone
numbers E-mail addresses E-mail search
sites The master list When in doubt
Most of us know how to find a Web page, but locating
people is something else again. Here's how you do it.
Telephone numbers
If you want to telephone a friend or relative but lack
their number, all you need to do is consult the White
Pages, place a call to Directory Assistance or, if you
belong to the more dedicated breed of Net-heads, go to
Telstra's White Pages site at www.whitepages.com.au.
E-mail addresses
Finding a person's e-mail address is substantially more difficult: there's no single authoritative directory online, although many companies are trying to establish their site as that long-awaited resource (no easy task with the number of e-mail addresses conservatively calculated at over 40 million).
It's particularly galling when you've just got your Internet account and are dying to start using e-mail but don't know the addresses of any of your friends or distant family.
Here are a few sites and strategies for locating e-mail addresses.
The most obvious way to obtain someone's e-mail address is to ask them -- call them on the phone, send a short fax or even write them a quick letter if you have to. They don't have to have a direct Net connection. For instance, if they work at a company in which all desktop PCs are connected through a local area network (LAN or simply 'network') and have internal e-mail for exchanging messages with co-workers, there may well be a 'gateway' machine which sits between the local network and the world beyond and lets everyone send and receive Internet mail.
In many cases, employees don't actually know they have
Internet e-mail capabilities and thus don't know their
e-mail address unless they ask the company's network
administrator. So if your friend isn't sure what their
address is, have them send you an e-mail -- this will
contain their address (in the From or Reply To field)
which you can use for replies and store in your address
book.
E-mail search
sites
There are scores of sites dedicated to providing a searchable database of e-mail addresses. Their most serious drawback is that Internet users must register (usually a fast, free and painless routine) in order to be listed. Even so, some Web pages are rapidly becoming the place to start looking.
The Four11 directory (www.four11.com) combines an e-mail database with the US white pages, Net phone and video phone listings. It's also worth stopping by WhoWhere? (www.whowere.com) and the Internet Address Finder (www.iaf.net).
Closer to home is the Australian Internet E-mail Directory (www.sofcom.com.au/Directories/EMAIL.AU.html), maintained by Net publishers Sofcom. Listings are only available to people whose e-mail address ends with the Australian .au domain. This limits the usefulness of the directory because it can't include members of US-based services such as MSN, CompuServe, PObox and HotMail, nor local companies who have registered a .com domain.
If a scan of these specialised engines strikes out, it's worth turning to a Web search engine such as AltaVista (www.altavista.yellowpages.com is the Australian mirror site), Lycos (www.lycos.com), Excite (www.excite.com) and HotBot (www.hotbot.com).
Because these index the entire World Wide Web, they can pinpoint any mention of a person's name just as easily as any other keyword you specify in the search field. If the person you're looking for appears on any Web page, there's a fair chance their e-mail address may be listed close by. The correct form for entering names varies between engines, so you should check each page's help screens to make your search as efficient and accurate as possible.
Several engines (among them AltaVista, Excite and HotBot) will also scour Usenet newsgroups. A more specialised newsgroup searcher is the Search the Usenet Addresses Database located at http://usenet-addresses.mit.edu.
Messages sent or 'posted' to newsgroups almost always contain the sender's e-mail address, so if the person you're seeking participates in newsgroups, this will quickly return their e-mail address!
A simple way to check the effectiveness of each engine
is to enter a particular name -- maybe even yours -- as
the search subject, then examine the number of 'hits',
their accuracy and the ratio of live links to dead links.
AltaVista usually scores well in this trial.
The master list
A master list of online people finders is available at
the ever-popular Yahoo (www.yahoo.com--
drill down to Reference, White_Pages, Individuals). This
includes pointers to specialised tools such as WhoIs,
Finger, Gopher and Knowbot servers.
When in doubt . .
.
Guess! Well, it's more of an educated guess than a stab in the dark.
Another canny avenue, if you know that someone works for a particular company, is to check if that organisation is online. Begin by entering the company's name in a search engine or using a structured cataloguer like Yahoo.
Once you've located the company's homepage, look for some kind of company directory online. It's very rare to find a complete list of personnel names, job titles and e-mail addresses, so this is an optimistic measure.
Try browsing through the Web site for the e-mail addresses of other staffers: this will usually include contact names and e-mail addresses found on those pages related to employment, sales or media relations. For example, if the contact for employment enquiries at Widgets Australia is a Ms Jenny Smith and her e-mail address is jenny_smith@widgets.com.au, then it's a fair bet that your friend Jack Jones will be jack_jones @widgets.com.au because the company policy for e-mail identifiers is probably firstname_lastname@widgets.com.au
Unfortunately, there's no standard convention for e-mail addresses. Other common styles, using the example of Jenny Smith, are in the form of jsmith, j_smith or jennys, but it could just as easily be Jenny Smith's nickname, her maiden or married name or a variation on her name if there's another person who qualifies for the jsmith or jennys address.
A less direct but more reliable route is to e-mail the company's WebMaster or any other general contact listed on the page (such as mail@widgets. com.au) - you'll find these addresses at the foot of the main Web page or on the ubiquitous 'How to contact us' page -- with a not-too-personal message for your friend and ask that it be forwarded to them. When I've done this I make the subject line and the first line of the message "Message for Jack Jones" or "Pls forward to Jack Jones, Accounts". Just make sure you provide an e-mail address in the body of the message.
Top of page
|What's New | Software | Net Guides | Web Workshop | Net Sites | About PC User |
All text © 1997 Australian Consolidated Press - PC User Magazine