Sunday, April 29, 2007

YoName as a possible spam resource

I read about a new site called YoName, which is a search engine for people, meaning it only searches social networking sites, such as LinkedIn.
As any curious person, I tried searching myself there, by my name and by my mail address.

I was shocked to find this mail from the site: "YO. Someone is searching for you on yoName.com"
The content of the message notified me I was searched, advertised the site, and had this text:
"This is a one-time email sent to you from yoName.com. Someone searched for your email address using yoName and while yoName is a free service, it's also anonymous. To unsubscribe from future emails from yoName, click here."

Unsubscribe? but I never subscribed, I just entered a search!

Receiving unsolicited advertisement (spam) from the site just because someone else searched your mail address is bad enough.
But now I know my mail is in their database:
I tried entering the search again, and got no further mails, meaning they checked the search result against a database of previous searches.
Seems to me this site is just waiting for a spammer to crack it and retrieve all the mails.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I actually have emailed YoName at support@yoname.com a few times with some questions and suggestions. I have been using the site frequently since I have been meeting people online (dating). YoName has been very responsive and seems very legit.

Adi said...

They may be legit, but I can't condone sending spam to someone just because I entered his/her mail in their search, and the same goes for harvesting those mail addresses.

Anonymous said...

From my limited knowledge about CAN-SPAM they seem to be in complaince. Anyway, I found the site from getting such an email and I use it all the time; so no complaints here...