Addresses in the United States formerly ended with three characters (such as edu for education or gov for government). Now all new address will end with us. In all other countries, Internet addresses end with a two-character code for the country.
The next section of the address is the division within the country. Old addresses in the United States usually contained the name of the university or a company. New addresses in the United States contain the two-character Postal code for the state. morris@grand.k12.ut.us
means I have a newer address, live in the United States, and in the state of Utah.
The next section to the left is a division within the university, company, or state.
means I work in K-12 education in the state of Utah in the United States. If there are additional sections on the right side of the at-symbol (@), these are more geographical divisions. Thus each section of the address to the right of the at-symbol are divisions and sub-divisions in the world. The name on the left side of the at-symbol is usually the person's login name on the network.
Obtaining Addresses
The best way to find a person's address is to ask them. Use the telephone or the public mail system and ask them what their address is. Copy it down carefully because a simple mistake in even one character or a dot means you can't address e-mail to that person.
When you obtain an account on the Internet, your network administrator will tell you what your address is. Because there is not on address book for everyone on the Internet, take a minute and share your address with all your friends, family, and business correspondants.
There have been some attempts to create a 'white pages' index or listing of all Internet addresses; but when you realize there are millions and millions of users on the Internet with more users being added every minute, you know that such an index is impossible. Some of the major indexing attempts are called finger, whois, knowbot, Netfind, Fred, and X.500. Each of these is briefly described below:
finger
The finger command allows you to check if someone is a valid user on a network. You need to log onto the network then type the command. Because this command has been abused in the past, not all networks still allow this command.
whois
This is a database which lists information about people and organizations. This command only works on networks and servers (hosts) which have established a whois database. To use the whois database, at the UNIX prompt type whois followed by a -h followed by the name of the database host followed by the name of the user. Here is an example:
The largest whois database in the world is at the InterNIC Registration Services Host (rs.internic.net).
knowbot
The knowbot was an experimental command that could search many different address databases regardless of how they were set up. With whois the database had to be set up in a particular way. With finger the database had a different format from whois. With the knowbot command, you could theoretically search any kind of database and find an address. The idea was to have one central knowbot service which would search all known databases in the world.
Unfortunately, the knowbot service has not been updated regularly and is outdated and unreliable. To try the knowbot anyway, send an e-mail message to:
kis@nri.reston.va.us
Leave the subject of the message blank. In the body of the message, type the following:
query user-name
where user-name is the name of the person whose address you are trying to find.
The knowbot service is an automatic service. You will receive a return mail message telling you of any finds.
Netfind
Netfind is similar to knowbot in that it will search several different databases. The difference is that knowbot is automated and Netfind is a location where you do the research yourself. To use Netfind, telent to one of the five Netfind host sites. Log in with the name netfind:
bruno.cs.colorado.edu
ds.internic.net
mudhoney.micro.umn.edu
netfind.oc.com
redmont.cis.uab.edu
Fred
Fred is a program that can search a special database in X.500 format (see below). Fred programs are new and rare. We suspect Fred will become more popular in time. Fred is an acronym that stands for "Front End to the Directory".
X.500
This is a standard or a format for keeping a database of information about users on the Internet and their addresses. Hopefully this will become the accepted standard in the future so only one program will be needed to find the address of a user. To access a database in the X.500 format, you would use a program called Fred. You can experiment with Fred by doing a telnet to wp.psi.com.
Commercial White Pages
Several companies print books of Internet addresses similar to the white pages of a telephone directory. With so many people on the Internet, a printed book may be impractical.