One kind of documents sites often place under gopher is their phonebook. This is a Unix-based search tool, and many UNIX sites limit user IDs to 8 characters.
Some sites allow longer 'aliases' for finger and for mailboxes.
The trick is to have the most current sources and tools available to you. This will locate an e-mail address of almost four million people. Large database to find e-mail addresses of individuals on the net. This is a nine-database search engine, including Internic 'white pages'. Very, very good and useful finger searcher.