How to find out another person's e-mail address

In some situations, someone may lose their contacts or personal address book, causing them to lose all the e-mail addresses of their friends and family. You may also lose contact with a person because they changed their e-mail addresses or be trying to look up old friends to keep in touch with them. In any case, finding someone's e-mail is a difficult or sometimes impossible task. Below are some different methods you can try when attempting to locate another person's e-mail address.

Other Friends, family, coworkers

One of the best methods of getting e-mail addresses is to contact other friends, family, and coworkers. Ask them if they know of the person's e-mail address, and if they do, if they could forward that address to you.

Saved e-mail

If you have any saved e-mails sent from the person, refer to these e-mails to view that person's e-mail address. Most e-mail programs and online e-mail services allow you to search all stored e-mail.

Websites, forums, blogs, and social networking pages

Another great method of finding a person's e-mail address is to locate their web page, blog (online journal), or social networking page.

A listing of each of the popular and widely used social networking sites is available on our social networking definition page. Our recommendation is to start with Facebook.

A listing of popular and widely used blog and online journal sites is available on our weblog definition page.

Search for their real life name

If you know the person's full name, searching for that person may pull up the person's work e-mail address, their homepage, or journal containing contact information. Unfortunately, people with non-unique names may be harder to find. Below are some different searches you could try in any popular search engine.

In the example below, we are searching for the name "Jane Doe," and replacing it with an alternative name. Realize that it is very unlikely you can find any e-mail address if you don't know the person's full name.

"Jane Doe"

Searching for the person's name in quotes will pull up any results that contain their full name. If the name is not a unique name, you may pull too many results. In this case, try adding additional keywords as shown below.

"Jane Doe" Utah
"Jane Doe" Utah High School, College, or University
"Jane Doe" Utah work

Adding the state, school, or work to your search helps eliminate bad results and help locate a match if it exists.

During your searches, you may also pull up other contact information, such as phone number or address, allowing you to request their e-mail address. Usually, it's easier to find a person's postal address or phone number than attempting to find the person's e-mail.

For example, you can find almost anyone's phone number and address that is listed in a local listing by typing Jane Doe Utah in a Google search.