In response to recent experimental studies we investigate Coulomb distortion effects on(e,e′)reactions from medium and heavy nuclei for the case of electrons and positrons. We extend our previously reported full DWBA treatment of Coulomb distortions to the case of positrons for the208Pb(e,e′)reaction in the quasielastic region for a particular nuclear model. In addition, we use previously reported successful approaches to treating Coulomb corrections in an approximate way to calculate the Coulomb distortion effects for(e,e′)reactions for both electrons and positrons for the case of a simple nuclear model for quasielastic knock-out of nucleons. With these results in hand we develop a simplead-hocapproximation for use in analyzing experiments, and discuss methods of extracting the “longitudinal structure function” which enters into evaluation of the Coulomb sum rule. These techniques are generally valid for lepton induced reactions on nuclei with momentum transfers greater than approximately 300MeV/c.©2001 American Institute of Physics.