How to Find Someone's Email Address

Tracking down someone's electronic email address can be challenging. This document will give you a number of options and utilities to help you look on-line for email addresses.

SSCC Members

If you know an SSCC member's username, you know their email address as well.  All SSC members have an email address that consists of their username plus @ssc.wisc.edu.  For example if you know someone's username is rdimond, then their email address is rdimond@ssc.wisc.edu.

You can look up any SSCC member by user name, first name, last name, or any part thereof, on the web.  This will provide their SSCC email address and other information.

Note that the email address listed is the member's SSCC email address. Some SSCC members prefer to use a different email address. Hopefully they have forwarded their SSCC email to their preferred address, but this is not always the case.

You can get similar information in Linux using a utility called sscwho.  You can access this on any of the Linux servers, simply by typing

> sscwho name

where name can be a first name, a last name, or even a username.

UW-Madison Faculty, Staff and Students

The UW directory is available on-line.  You can use this directory to look up any faculty or staff member, or student, who has agreed to list this information.  To access this on Linux, at the prompt type

> lookup Russell Dimond

You can also access this directory from a web page on the UW-Madison web site.

One final way to access this directory is within Thunderbird, where you can set it up as part of your address book. Click Tools, Address Book and then in the Address Book window click File, New, LDAP Directory. This will get you a window where you can enter the properties of the directory.

For Name enter anything you like (University Directory, for example). This is for your use, not the computer's. Set Hostname to ldap.services.wisc.edu. Set Base DN to dc=wisc,dc=edu. The Port Number should start at 389 and there's no need to change it. The rest can be left blank. Click OK.

To use it, open the directory, and type the name you want to look up in the box near the upper right hand corner with the magnifying glass. Results will appear below.

Off-campus On-line Directories

There are a wide variety of directories available on-line.  Most universities have a directory similar to the UW's, and there's usually a link on the university's main web page.  There are also a number of on-line directories that cover larger numbers.  Some of those resources include:

The University of Wisconsin System directory

The State of Wisconsin Employee listing

Switchboard for general look-up

Address and Phone Number Search at Yahoo

You can also use your favorite search engine to look up a person.  If you find their web page, often there is an email address or an email link on that page.  If not, there may be other contact information (email isn't the only way to reach someone, after all).

Last Revised: 8/18/2005