Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.

No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still  help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl andSpokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Source :- labnol.org

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How to Check if an Email Address is Valid and Exists

How do you know if an email address exists or not? The easy option would be that you send a dummy mail to that email address, wait for an hour or so and if your message bounces, it is very likely that the particular email address does not exist. The approach works but wouldn’t it be nice if you could check any email address instantly without even sending that test message?
The other slightly technical option to verify an email address is by querying the mail server. You connect to the mail server through telnet (see video), enter your email address and the other email address that you are trying to verify. If the server response is an error code, the email address is probably not valid.

How to Check Email Addresses Instantly

Let me share an extremely simple method for checking if an email address is valid and exists or not.

Go to the login page of the email service and pretend that you no longer remember the password of your email account. The service will ask for your email address where they can send the password recovery instructions. Here if you enter an email address that does exist, the service is mostly likely to tell you that the particular user name does not exist. I have tested this with Google Apps, Yahoo Mail and Outlook (Hotmail) and the method works with them all.

For Gmail and Google Apps Accounts

Go to Google’s password assistance page at google.com/accounts/recovery and choose the I don’t know my password option. Enter the email address that you are trying to verify – it could be an @gmail address or a Google Apps address – and choose Continue. If that address is not valid, Google will throw an error saying No account found with that email address.

Alternatively, you can go to the Gmail Sign-up page ataccounts.google.com/SignUp and try creating a new Gmail account with the address that you are trying to verify. For valid email address, the error would saySomeone already has that username.

For Outlook, Hotmail and Live.com Addresses

Go to account.live.com/ResetPassword, choose the I forgot my password option and enter the Outlook email address. You will get an error saying The Microsoft account is incorrect. for addresses that do not exist.

For Verifying Yahoo Email Addresses

Go to Yahoo’s account recovery page at edit.yahoo.com/forgot, enter the @yahoo.com email address that you are checking for validity and click the Next button. Yahoo will say We couldn’t match the Yahoo ID you entered with information in our database if the email address does not exist.

Source :- labnol.org

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How to Find the Email Address of a Person

You are sending an email to an old friend but you aren't too sure if the email address that you just entered into the compose window is correct or not?

There are numerous ways to find someone’s email address.

For instance, you may search any old correspondence with that person in your mail archives, use a people search engine (like Pipl), use the WHOIS data of that person’s website or, if nothing works, search for that person’s name on Google (include the @ symbol in quotes) and you may sometimes find their email address in the search results.

How to Find Someone’s Email Address

There’s however a better way. You can guess a few addresses and then use LinkedIn’s Rapportive add-on for Gmail to verify if any of your guesses point to the right person or not.

Go to your Gmail inbox, compose a new message and enter the email address that you have guessed. Now hover your mouse over the address and Rapportive will show a list of various social profiles – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – that are associated with the email address.

If you are to recognize a profile in the social results, you can be pretty much sure that your guess was correct. If no social results are found for that email address, it means either that email address doesn’t exist, or the person doesn’t have a social presence or they could have associated a different email address with their social profiles.

Rapportive is available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and you’ve to have a Gmail account to use this tool.

Source :- labnol

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