Archive for June 17th, 2009

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.

You may have heard of “six degrees of separation”. So for example, we all know someone who knows someone, who knows someone etc and that if we multiply this by 6, then we have someone that we can claim a connection to. Alex knows Bob, Bob knows Charles, Charles knows David, David knows Edna, Edna knows Frank who knows Donald Trump!

But you cannot expect a concept like 6 degrees of separation to be valid in real life at all times. 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.

Firstly, if you have any social networking site memberships, use the contacts there to ask if anyone can help you find someone. If you email your networking contacts, you could get good results – a site with 100 friends on it is 100 chances to find the information you seek.

From your existing address book, just highlight any address you need and mail a request for assistance, and you’ll get help tracing this. This may only give you people finder sites which isn’t really using email, but it will kickstart finding people in any event.

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 the case, they remain hidden and you just need to accept their privacy is something beyond your control.

But when you need someone’s address, email is good as a starting point – even if there are better methods. The best way is to have a combination of web searches, using social networking sites and people finder sites, just to make sure that you cover all possibilities and give your search the best possible start. Searching by 6 degrees of separation will only get you so far – you need more help to achieve good results every time.