The Online World resources handbook

Electronic mail, telex, and fax http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/7.html
When people talk about this phenomenon, they often refer to it as "Internet mail,"
even if they are just using the Internet as kind of a telephone exchange.
Let us take a closer look at the art of addressing mail through the Internet and the
Matrix.
Finding a friend's email address
The best method of finding a friend's email address is usually to call your friend and ask.
Many people have several mailboxes. Only by asking will you find out which mailbox is
being used!
So, you don't know the telephone number? Try http://www.contractjobs.com/tel/.
This site offers links to online telephone, fax, and business directories around the world.
Sometimes, the information provided by a recipient is not enough. Maybe the
address needs an extension for mail to be routed through gateways to the destination?
Typically, the syntax of the address is wrong. Perhaps you made a mistake, when
you wrote it down (KIDCAFE TOPICS became KIDSCAFE TOPICS).
The return address in the received messages' mailer headers may be wrong. Yes,
this happens surprisingly often. It may use a syntax that is illegal on your email system,
or suggest a routing that is unknown to your system. When trying to send a reply to this
address, the Mailer Daemon complains: "This is a non existent address."
Again, the first person to contact for help is your local postmaster. On many
Internet hosts, this is simple. If you have a mailbox on the ULRIK computer at the
University of Oslo, send your request to postmaster@ulrik.uio.no . If you are on
COLNET in Buenos Aires, send to postmaster@colnetr.edu.ar .
POSTMASTER is also the address to turn to on BITNET. Users of FidoNet or
RelayNet, write to SYSOP.
There are hundreds of "whois servers" around the world. The systems
whois.nic.ad.jp and whois.ripe.net cover Japan and Europe. Others provide information
about local users. (For a list, see ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/whois/whois servers.list.)
Note: You need to know the exact address of your recipient, and whether he is
using this mailbox regularly. Many users have mailboxes that they use rarely or
never. $OVR WKLQN RI WKH HDVLHVW ZD\ IRU D UHFLSLHQW WR UHVSRQG EHIRUH VHQGLQJ D PHVVDJH
to him or her.
Directories of subscribers and services
While many hosts let you search lists of local users, no complete global directory of
available electronic addresses exists!
Several services on the Internet offer help. My favorite is the Usenet address
database ,W LV DOVR DFFHVVLEOH E\ HPDLO WR mail server@rtfm.mit.edu. To query, put the
following in the body of your text:
send usenet addresses/[name searching for]
The "name" should be one or more space separated words for which you want to search.
Since the search is "fuzzy" (that is, all the words you specify do not have to match), you
should list all words you think might appear in the address, including first and last name,
possible username, and possible parts of the host name. The case and order of the words
you list are ignored. (Send the command "send usenet addresses/help" to this address for
more information.) Example:
send usenet addresses/odd de presno
X.400 systems use an address directory according to ITU TSS standard X.500 that
connect several directories. The developers hoped that routing of X.400 messages may
eventually be done automatically without the user needing to know the identity of the
recipient's mailbox computer. However, it never became a big success.
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) was introduced as an
alternative to X.500 to become "the comprehensive Internet wide e mail address
directories of the future". It is a subset of the Directory Access Protocol (DAP) used to
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