Losing an email of an old friend or contact can be frustrating; with over 360,985,492 people online the idea of tracking down a single person can be daunting. However there are methods you can use to simplify this search.

There are many specialized websites designed to help you find what you are looking for, the most popular are sites like Emailfinder or Peoplesmart. They work by typing in the person’s name you are seeking and then scouring over 400 million public records, phone book directories and other sources. There are six main email directories these are; Yahoo, Who – Where, IAF, InfoSpace, Bigfoot, and SwitchBoard.

Try the following sites to help track down your contact
www.Emailfinder.com
www.Peoplesmart.com
www.myfreemailsearch.com

Social networking has now become a global phenomenon with now more than 500 million users logging onto Facebook daily and another 20 million joining the growing craze every day. It is most certainly a useful tool in looking up that lost email contact. As long as you have an account the site offers search engine to look up friends, family, old colleagues and acquaintances. Go to their search option and type in whatever information you already have, this could be a name, an email, a town, a country, a high school they went to or an old company.

You can also try typing their name into search engines like Google or Yahoo. Google and Yahoo are the biggest search databases used on the World Wide Web. Google may even be seen as the poster child of the internet by many with staggering figures of over one billion visitors per month. If anyone can find what you are looking for then it looks like Google can.

Your lost contact may have their own personal website if they run, own or work for a business, you can try typing the business name into the search engine and once you have located their website search for the contact information, usually a tab will be provided somewhere on the webpage offering telephone numbers, address or email information.

Check your own email folder to find out whether you have their email stored somewhere in your records. If you have had previous contact or correspondence with the person this may very well be a successful option. Try using your personal emails search mail option to find out if the information is stored.

Perhaps the person you are seeking has changed their email address and you still only have the old one, there are many websites now that offer up the new email information as long as the person is registered and you have their old email address handy to type into their search engine.

You should also take this information into account and think that someone out there may also be looking for you! Why not sign up your information to accounts like email finder and fresh address so when people need to contact you, they don’t have to go through the same hassle.

If the person you are seeking works for a certain company or attends a known educational institute then you can try making an educated guess with this information in mind. Most large corporations, companies and institutions use a uniformed pattern when assigning email addresses. Common email addressing schemes are using first and last names, using full names, using initials as the user name and the company’s name as the domain name, for example Dawnparry@walmart.com

If you are searching for a certain email someone has sent you in the past, you can try taking their name, or a key phrase or topic of the conversation and typing into the search mail option in your personal email. For example if you are searching for catering quotes from Shawn Taylor. You can try typing Shawn Taylor into your search bar; all the emails from Shawn Taylor will then appear on your email screen. If you type catering quotes then all the emails you have received or sent relating to the phrase catering quotes will appear. This method can save plenty of time rather than trawling through endless pages of old emails that are irrelevant you your search.

Whatever the method there are plenty of avenues you can go down to try and track down that lost contact, if you have common friends or contacts try asking around, odds are someone else will know.

Once you have successfully recovered your contacts email address, be sure to save it for future use and avoid going through this process again. You can add contacts to folders using your email preferences and marking certain names as important. Also try writing all your contacts down manually in an address book, in case the unthinkable happens and your computer system crashes.