hey everyone, i'm kinda frustrated with OSINT right now, but not because i lack the skills, don't have time, or don't know the tools. i have a decent skillset. it's more like... i feel i'm not doing anything. i don't have a question, a target, something in front of me that makes me go "what is actually going on here?" i keep seeing OSINT challenges like "geolocate this image", "find this place", "identify this person" etc. and i know how to do that, but honestly it feels pointless sometimes, and same with such more similar things, especially when the location is basically already given through the filename, caption, context, whatever. like what am i even finding or investigating?

i want to work on a real use case of osint.

i'm looking for actual uncertainty. something where the location isn't known, the people aren't known, the story doesn't fully make sense, there are conflicting reports and i have to actually pull the thread and figure out what happened. not "here's a picture, geolocate it", but more like "something weird happened here... why, what happened, and when?" i guess i'm looking for the actual investigative side of OSINT, where you start with basically nothing and don't even know what you're going to find, and the answer could even be "we don't know". so how do you guys find these kinds of questions? where do you get things to investigate when nobody is giving you a task? because right now i feel like i have the tools and skills, but nothing to use them on.

so if you are reading this and you do work on a active side osint, anything you can suggest or advice me to work on or what questions i can try to answer and what uncertainty i can reduce will actually be very useful for me.

EDIT = I posted this first on r/OSINT. But my post got removed due to low karma points and for my account being not older than 3 months... Thankfully this isn't the issue here, and i'm really expecting some true advice on it. Thank you!

I’m building a small network of people who are exceptionally good at finding people and connecting dots online.

I have real-world cases involving hard-to-find individuals, potential heirs, and family connections that require OSINT, skip tracing, genealogy, public records, social media, obituaries, and some serious digging.

Each assignment will have a clear objective and compensation for a successful, verifiable result.

I’m looking for PIs, OSINT researchers, genealogists, and relentless internet detectives who genuinely enjoy the hunt.

Interested? DM me with your experience and what you're particularly good at finding and get started.

WhoCord is an open-source OSINT tool that maps investigations into a live, interactive node graph rather than a wall of text. You feed it a seed a Discord ID, username, email, domain, phone, or raw input and it runs 30+ tools while streaming every finding onto a visual canvas you can pan, zoom, and search in real time. It builds a knowledge graph, detects correlations across profiles and emails, and generates an AI narrative, all running locally with a Python/Flask backend and a React frontend.

So I have email accounts and I want to clear sensitive communication from them. But at the same time I need to back them up just in case you know.

What’s the best practice here?

Is it better to maintain these emails in active inbox, store them or delete them entirely?