Every day more people try to establish contact with old friends and colleagues, using the internet. There are various ways of doing this and this article explores whether using email alone is the best way of finding long lost friends and relations.

You may have heard of “six degrees of separation”. If you take all the people you know, and add the people THEY know, and so on for 6 rounds, that’s a huge database of contacts to investigate. So A knows B. And B knows C. And C knows D. D knows F, who knows the Pope!

However, you cannot rely on 6 degrees of separation as a reliable idea. But if you persevere you can have a degree of success in finding people, simply by using an email address, rather than searching the web.

Firstly, if you have any social networking site memberships, use the contacts there to ask if anyone can help you find someone. For every 100 friends you have on a networked site, just one email can generate at least a few results.

From your existing address book, just highlight any address you need and mail a request for assistance, and you’ll get help tracing this. It may well be that this simply generates some ‘People finder’ websites, which is not actually finding people by email alone, but email will certainly kickstart the process of finding them.

Remember though, however you search, that some people may not wish to be found, so they have taken care to ensure that they do not have a widely known email address and are not registered with any networking sites, nor do they have their contact details on any websites, or maybe they just have a new email address. In this instance, they will stay unknown to you, and you will just need to understand that some people like to keep their privacy.

But if you’re looking for someone, there may be better methods than email, although it’s a good idea to begin with email. The best results will come from using all 3 methods – web search, social networking sites and also people finder sites. Don’t put all your faith in finding someone based on the 6 degrees of separation theory: it really isn’t that simple, you need to use all the tools you can in your search.