How To Find Someone on Facebook with Their E-Mail Address

If you’re trying to reconnect with an old friend, Facebook is probably one of the first places you’ll look. But what happens when you only have an e-mail address to go by, or the person you’re looking for didn’t use their real name to create a Facebook account?

You could send a friendly e-mail asking to be added to their friends list. But what if that person doesn’t use the same e-mail address anymore? Many people use their old e-mail addresses to open social media accounts and then they never check their inbox, except if they forget their password.

The good news is that there are a few ways to track someone down by using their e-mail address.

Using the Facebook Search Function

By far the easiest way to find someone’s Facebook profile with an e-mail address is to make use of the Facebook search function.

1. Click the search box

2. Type in or copy and paste the e-mail address

3. Press Enter

But if this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. First of all, Facebook can’t give you results if you type in an incomplete e-mail address.

Secondly, Facebook privacy settings may get in the way of your query. If someone has their profile set to private, chances are that you won’t get reliable results.

Also worth noting is that Facebook tends to give you “most relevant” results based on your circle of friends and friend suggestions. When you do search for someone by name or by e-mail address, you have to select the See All Results For option from the drop-down menu.

How to Narrow Down Results

There’s also the possibility that you will get too many results after typing in an e-mail address. And, if the profile picture is not clear, you may end up passing by the person you’ve been looking for.

Using the filtering menu might help you narrow some things down. Of course, this only helps if you know some additional details such as:

1. Date
2. Groups
3. Seen or unseen posts
4. Location tags, and so on.

Don’t Underestimate Google

By far the most popular search engine on the planet, Google Search can be your best friend in these situations. Say someone didn’t list a public e-mail address on Facebook. There’s still a chance they associated themselves and their Facebook profile with that e-mail address somewhere else online.

This could be a forum, blog, website, YouTube video comment section, you name it. In some situations, it’s easiest to find someone’s Facebook profile by pasting the e-mail address in the Google Search engine and performing a search.

If that person happens to own a personal blog or be actively involved in an online community, you may be in luck. People with an active online social life tend to make their contact information easily available, and you may just find a Facebook profile link in one of their posts.

How to Avoid Being Found Yourself through E-Mail Address Searches

Changing the privacy settings on Facebook is fairly intuitive. You will find a link to the settings tab by clicking on the drop-down menu icon, which is the arrow pointing down in the top right corner of the screen, next to the Help icon.

1. Go to Settings

2. Go to the Privacy tab

3. Under the How People Find and Contact You tab, edit the third field

You can choose between Everyone, Friends of friends, and Friends only. This tells Facebook which users you’re comfortable sharing your e-mail address with.

You could also set the last option from this menu to No. This will prevent outside search engines from linking to your Facebook profile. In addition to all this, you can also make it so no one who’s not on your friends list can search and find your profile by using your phone number.

A Final Word

Whatever the reason may be that you want to find someone’s profile on Facebook, the privacy settings available at the moment may make it difficult to do so using an e-mail address. The most effective method is still searching with full names and filtering the results by location and other data that could narrow down your search.

But a Google search may yield great results, as not everyone takes the time to run through all the mentioned privacy settings. Hiding from Facebook engine searches is easier and it’s usually done by everyone when they set up their profile for the first time.