One issue that can arise when you are researching an individual living in the U.S. is the Phone-Email Divide. If you have a phone number, at least in the U.S., you can use various people-searching websites to find additional information like the name and address. Similarly, an email address can be used to find affiliated social media accounts. But it is difficult to connect a phone number to an email, or vice versa. This post is about how to cross that gap between phones and emails.

The answer is to first use the email address to find a social media account that reveals the owner’s name. Once you have a name you can search it in a people-searching website that will find the phone affiliated with that name. This process also works in reverse.

People-Searching Websites

There are five people-searching websites in particular that can be used for this process. Each website has its own inputs (data you can search on) and outputs (results).

It is important to note that if you do not want your personal information listed on these sites, they each have an “opt out” option available.

True People Search (truepeoplesearch.com) is by far the most reliable site for researching a phone number. The site uses name, address, and phone number as search inputs or outputs. The site will sometimes give the person’s email as an output.

That’s Them (thatsthem.com) and Search People Free (searchpeoplefree.com) are not always consistent with their results but they use name, address, phone, and email as inputs and outputs. These people-searching websites have the obvious potential to solve the whole problem by linking a phone directly with an email, thus negating the need for the rest of this process. Therefore, it makes sense to start with these sites.

Xlek.com and Radaris.com will only let you search by name to find the phone, but not let you search in reverse. Public Email Records (publicemailrecords.com) uses email, name, and address as both inputs and outputs.

Email to Social Media

There are several guides for using an email account to find affiliated social media accounts. Specifically, there are three methods (see linked guides that are effective as of September 2020) to do a reverse search that will find if an email address is affiliated with a LinkedIn page or Facebook account. Presumably/Hopefully the social media accounts will enable you to find the owner’s name. And of course it is always a good idea to just Google it.