Now and then I intend to provide practice tips that might be useful to my fellow personal injury lawyers who may be reading my blog. Why give my “competition” practical advice? Simple. I firmly believe that we ALL benefit when we help someone to do a better job and accordingly, I am always willing to help another attorney even if they happen to be a NY accident lawyer like me……
Below is a useful tip that is useful to everyone who may be frustrated by not being able to find someone’s email address. Heck, we can look up phone numbers, why can’t we look up email addresses?
Just saw a very useful post at Attorney Barry Barnett’s Blawgletter blog. Here is the really useful part of his post:
To get accurate email addresses for a specific individual, do this:
- Go to your favorite search engine. Most people like Google. Yahoo!, Dogpile, the search functions on web browsers such as Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, and other engines will work fine too.
- If you know where the person works or worked, search for for the employer’s name, go to its principal Internet site, and note the site’s domain name. Here, hogwarts.edu.
- Next, search for the domain name — in our example, hogwarts.edu. You may want to put the “@” at the front just in case the search engine recognizes that as a distinct character (something Google seems not to do).
- The search will probably return lots of responsive references, but you should look for ones that — Voilà! — include email addresses that use the domain name. Note which protocol the email addresses use: First name only (harry@hogwarts.edu)? Just last name (potter@hogwarts.edu)? First initial plus last name (hpotter@hogwarts.edu)? First name plus last name (harry.potter@hogwarts.edu, harry_potter@hogwarts.edu, or harry-potter@hogwarts.edu)? Formal names (harold_potter@hogwarts.edu)? Or some other variation?
- Now search for the domain name plus the person’s name. If that doesn’t work, do a search for different possible variations of the actual email address using the protocol you discovered in step 4. Should you learn from the search that Hogwarts assigned ron.weasley@hogwarts.edu to Harry Potter’s friend Ron Weasley, you might start by searching for harry.potter@hogwarts.edu.
- Should you still not have the email address, the final thing you can do is start sending emails to the email addresses that seem most likely in light of the protocol. Again resorting to our example, we’d imagine that harry.potter@hogwarts.edu could make a good start. If the email bounces back, read the error message in the bounceback alert. If it says no such address exists, that likely means that you need to try another address, still using the protocol that Hogwarts typically uses.
These methods won’t always succeed of course. Some organizations have firewalls and filters, for example, that don’t allow emails from addresses they don’t recognize as safe. But we bet you’ll get decent results more often than not.
Hope this is a useful tip for all of you!
Thanks, Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff, Weiermiller, Hayden & Mustico, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com