Good email search engine

[drdoom]

Anyone have any suggestions. Google produces lots of them but most are just fronts to send you to pay sites like Intellus. I just want to look up email of people I have lost contact with, not really intersted in their divorce records etc.

[Steve R Jones]

Are you thinking it'd be nice if some site collected email addresses...and you could just go there and type in John Doe and BOOM - you and you're old buddy are friends again? Would you want someont to verify that the address is still good and being monitored by your old friend?

Have you ever seen the info that's out there with your real name? With a common name like mine, there's a boat load and its really hard to tell whos who.

[ua549]

AFAIK most people use handles or fictitious names on the internet.
Others have multiple email addresses, each with a different purpose.

Is that Steve R Jones or is it really Stefanie Smith?
Inquiring minds don't want to know!

A Google search on my real name returns nothing related to me or my family.

[ImaNihilist]

Rapleaf has a service that can do this for you. That's basically what they do. It's not free though. They will do matching of email addresses. So if they find two different email addresses that both use the same name, they try to link them together. In my experience, it doesn't work that well.

If you have the email address though, SM2 (http://sm2.techrigy.com/main/) might work well for you. I've used it before with good success.

I try to keep my profile clean, although there are a few listings now of my real name since I had to use it for work. Nothing bad, but I had zero footprint a year ago under my real name. My last name is going to be changing soon though, so I'm not too worried. Clean internet start!

[gateway]

(sorry for a little bit of a tangent, but)
Kind of a cool project by MIT which reinforces the inexact and confusing world of digital ID (and thus the inherent problems associated with email searching):
http://personas.media.mit.edu/ *

"In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name."

*I've heard Personas has trouble running in Firefox with tabs open in case you try it (which you should be cause it's fun and pretty, although if there isn't enough of a footprint, it won't find anything)