if the site is down, you must frown. (yes, that was really bad).

The connection has timed out

The server at identifight.org is taking too long to respond.

jdw242b

Aw, it's down. Guess I'll have to harvest information about my friends the old fashioned way.

samhealer42

In the interim, [www.spokeo.com] will have to do.

bex

Yup. Definitely down.

finalellipsis

Looks like the old, LifeHacker effect to me

Munkii

It's back up, but I just searched for a Very public email address I have had for nine years and Nothing came up. No error or site down message, it said "no results found." Thsi seems inaccurate to me.

kratos76

@Munkii: Over at Consumerist, they're calling it the Consumerist Effect, or that the site got "consumed" ;-)

@bex: I think the consensus (again, at Consumerist) was that Spokeo is evil because it asks for your e-mail password and Identifight is not. But with Identifight having been down all day due apparently to the Gawker Media Effect (apparently the site has been Gawked...) I haven't been able to try it out.

humphrmi

I agree with Kratos. I entered an email address I've had since high school -- it gets inundated with spam -- and I got the "no results found," message. I call shenanigans.

Slade1411

Same here... entered my "spam-o-rama" e-mail address and it came up with nothing. I'm not putting in my private address until I hear whether or not this is a harvesting operation.

humphrmi

Ditto. My primary address I've used since 1999 returned nothing. It is flooded with spam.

criticman

@humphrmi I didn't give them a real address that I use. I just imported the addresses via CSV for the presentation I needed it for.

bex

I entered my main email and it came up with a Friendster account, my Flickr and my website associated with that email. But I'm sure there's a lot more attached to that email.

lesbiansayswhat

Lifehacker, are you guys serious? This is like one of those "Has your credit card number been stolen on the internet?" ads.

twoply

Definitely shenanigans. Gave 2 email addresses, both ones I receive mail for but aren't very spammy in general (but ones I was willing to sacrifice). They each received the same new spam within 2 hours (same delay on each).

Also, the domain name was only registered on March 19th and has bogus whois contact info. So I supplied the tech contact email from the DNS record (dns@hubmed.org, hubmed.org was last updated in 2006) to identifight so that at least hopefully he'll get his own spam.

Rat-bastards.

Seriously though, Lifehacker, a bit of discretion when considering whether to submit this kind of post would be very welcome. You used to be better at this.

Kangarara

Perhaps you should try entering it in a search engine - although the US govt works very closely with google and yahoo will sell anything it can (think china) you will do just as well without risking this home brewed search tool which most likely queries the big boys anyway

lotsofchunks

If you'll all send me your bank account numbers and pin codes I'll check it against a secret database to see if any of that information is available to the public. Oh and dont worry. You can trust me, I seem genuine. ;-)

Lazarus

@Kangarara: I also used two different email addresses, received no spam. And there's a warning in the post from the get-go, so I'm not sure what you're issue is.

@twoply: ditto.

Adam Pash

well thank god for gmail. I did get new spam today...great job lifehacker

simmo

Dangit. I should've read the comments before using my own real email addresses. :p

JaimeZX

Likewise should have read the comments - how about deleting this topic Lifehacker???

primro

Definately try using Google, Ask, Clusty, Live, etc. search :)

You'd be SURPRISED.

I once "Googled" my address, and found it within a 10MB text file, hosted on a geoshitties.com page...I reported the user, and within 48 hours, the file, and the users page was wiped out by GeoCities/Yahoo, Inc. :P

But yea...you'd be surprised the shit that turns up if you google your address.

Try alias@domain.tld and

alias domain.tld since some spiders ignore @ signs, then again, some may ignore periods too....so you could try

alias hotmail
alias gmail
etc.

See what pops up.

BTW, I've had great success with lowering my spam count, since forwarding it to knujon.com, spamcop.net, and castlecops.com/sirt.

Almost like magic...lol.

ahoier

Another vote for deleting this topic. An email address that never had problems before is now receiving lots of "Undeliverable," "Failure Notice," and similar messages. In other words, my email address is now the apparent (though not actual) sender of tons of spam.

Now I need to find a Lifehacker post on how to resolve this issue. Or maybe I should look to some other site -- I'm not too trusting of Lifehacker at this moment ...

LHS

Maybe people are seeing their addresses harvested, but what no one seems to have mentioned yet is that this could be happening at the social sites that IdentiFight queries. I've looked at the developer's page, and he looks like a reputable human.

Who can say it's not the social networking sites that he's searching that's doing the address collection? Any terms and conditions that appear to protect registered addresses wouldn't apply to those addresses that aren't associated with an account. Those addresses would then be ripe for sale.

Food for thought before everybody goes blaming a middleware developer for being a spammer

whereswill

I'd like to reassure anyone who's concerned (understandably): IdentiFight isn't selling or passing on any of the email address given to it, except - as whereswill mentions - to the sites that are being searched, as part of the query.

The point of IdentiFight is to allow people to protect their privacy; selling email addresses to spammers wouldn't make sense.

hubgawker

OK, so let's assume that IdentiFight itself isn't harvesting email addresses. The email address that I entered on IdentiFight yesterday -- and that is being spoofed today -- isn't (or wasn't) associated with any social networking sites. Which of the sites that IdentiFight queries might be harvesting this address for spam purposes?

LHS

Perhaps I should have qualified my last post - after using identifight yesterday I've seen a marked increase in 'joe job' attacks* using the mail address that was submitted to identifight.

Now to be fair, this address wasn't virgin, so it could just be coincidence. However the increase in joe job attacks using this address is particularly remarkable, too much to be coincidental IMO.

Reading the author's site it seems on the face of it to be plausibly legit, perhaps it could be that somewhere along the line harvester are grabbing the addresses like mentioned above.

Use caution.

* ie attacks where an address is used to send mail to third parties which invariably result in bounces from idiotic mail servers who don't recognize this kind of attack and blindly accept mail without checking at least that the recipient and preferably the sender exist first.

munk

Spam trap, avoid. Why is this post still visible?

munk

Some people are saying spam, some are saying it is legit. Anyone have a real idea?

Ashley927

yoname yielded better results on an old spameriffic address of mine than identifight.

tubeyes