People generally know how to perform a reverse phone lookup- all you have to do is read the unknown number from the caller ID and search for it using Google search engine and it will perform a search for you. The search engine will easily return your query and let you know the information about the caller and this is especially true if the number was for a business entity. Performing the same steps for an email is more difficult. There is no central listing of email addresses like phone numbers are listed in a phone book. When you sign up for a phone number and service, you must supply verifiable personal information like your social security number. But with email, you don't have to provide a full name at all, let alone your real name. Even honest people who have no intention of misusing their email account often sign up for accounts using only their initials or a nickname for security reasons.
This is what makes it so difficult to run a reverse email search on your own. To start of you could try and search the email address into a search engine like Google, but unless the person has listed their complete email address on a web page or site, you are unlikely to get any useful information. There are free email search websites that can look up a specific person's email address or look up who owns an email address, but most of the time you're not going to get a lot of valuable information from a free search. Another option you could look into would be to visit the website for the email provider and look around to try to find a sort of directory which has a search function with email address. Like to give you an example, most universities and colleges maintain a public access directory, so this means if the person who you are looking for has a email address ending in .edu, you could just Google the university name and perform a search on their directory. But you may not be so lucky and so this method will not work.
Lastly you have paid options where certain sites will contain confirmed databases and you could perform a reverse email address lookup which will provide you with the identity of the email address owner.