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Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Who's to say these guys aren't stealing our emails?

They don't need to steal if you publish your email address yourself wfunction... http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.d.general/86923

I don't appreciate you stalking me and posting that here (just because it's accessible somewhere on the internet doesn't mean I want to make it more public), but as a matter of fact I wasn't talking about that email address in the first place.

http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/ ;)

your email is not a secret.

No, but it can be harvested for directed attacks or spamming. Entering it would basically 'prove' it's a valid address.

The Adobe leaks list is mostly made up of verified emails, so...

Coming to think of it, there has been some spam lately (though that hasn't happened in years now at gmail), and I wonder whether it's related to that Adobe leak.

Ah, but by checking if your email is compromised, they get even more emails then they did just from compromised sources.

On a risk / reward basis the benefit to checking here is actually pretty high.

I don't find any of several accounts I use on there, but did find a friend's email listed (and just notified him). I'd actually appreciate a way to query my mailing list in an automated fashion.

Did your friend have an input on the the risk/reward decision?

It's the same reason why you don't reply to spam; it confirms your email is valid. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376031,00.asp

That's been the conventional wisdom for decades, but I don't actually think it's true. I wonder if anyone has done any tests.

The reply address for spam is almost certainly bogus. And I don't think it makes sense to target people who unsubscribe for more spam. They ain't likely to buy anything.

The geolocation part of that advice is a little paranoid for webmail users.

Secret, probably not. But in most cases I'm reasonably confident that each email address I use is currently only known by me, the one site I registered it with and the NSA.

I have a couple of email addresses that thanks to that address either having been sold, hacked or given away by including in the to/cc field of a mass mailing are now out in the public domain, and I get spam (and almost certainly malware attempts) on those two on a pretty regular basis. I'd prefer to not have the rest of my email addresses end up in the same situation.

well, if you decide to list it under your HN bio, then obviously, it's not :)

But it's not public information either, unless you choose to make it public.

But its a real email

You can't steal somebody's email just by knowing their address.

If you wanted to collect likely-valid email addresses to sell to spammers, this would be a good way to go about it. I doubt they are, but can understand the suspicion.

They already have 150M+ valid email addresses from the breach if they wanted to spam people.

I doubt they are too, but they should be really proving it somehow.

Did you mean to ask 'are they harvesting our emails?'.

Have you been pawned? Yes, now that you just gave us your email address to sell to Russian hackers.

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