Can spammers get my email address from WordPress?
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It seems that the Contact link exposes my email address. This is NOT acceptable. I am greatly concerned about the abuse of my own email address, but I am much more concerned about the potential abuse of my students’ email addresses if I use WordPress to support my writing class (from September).
Actually, it is not even believable. I cannot believe that WordPress can even survive if spammers can exploit it that easily, so I must be missing something here. No one welcomes spam.
I have spent a while searching the Support and Forums webpages and so far I have failed to find the answers. Perhaps the larger question is why am I failing the find the information that must be here. Spammers are NOT a minor scourge. Do I need to use a throwaway email address? Make my WordPress webpages private in some way and explicitly give permission to my students to read them?
(Getting off target, but I do think there are solution approaches to the spammer problems, but they are out of scope here. Just for reference: FtM and EPR.)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I feel like I should clarify my increasing concern with how the help system works… I don’t think I have yet encountered any difficult problems, but only minor problems that any new member (even including my students) might encounter. Therefore the answers should be easy to find, but I have failed miserably to find them. Just to recap:
Problem 1: A test webpage I created some years ago was badly broken. I did nothing, but it apparently fixed itself when I wasn’t looking. If I did something to break it, then I have no idea what it was, but I might accidentally teach my students to break it again…
Problem 2: My email address appears to be exposed on the new webpage I created. If so, then that’s a horrendous default and it was absolutely NOT my intention to ask for more spam.
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Contact forms are specifically for suppressing your email address by use of confidential exachnges. Please read this support doc https://en.support.wordpress.com/forms/contact-form/
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There is no contact form on this site http://tsosp.wordpress.com/ that I can access.
Have you also consulted this support doc Unwanted Comments and Comment Spam
https://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/BTW many of us long time bloggers choose to use throwaway email addresses for online accounts. Therefore, our personal email addresses are know only to family and close friends.
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Contact link exposes my email address
You misunderstand. Note that there will be auto-filled information in a contact form or a comment box but your information is visible to you when you are logged in and have not cleared your browser cache and cookies. No one else can see it.
If you log out, clear your browser cache https://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/#clearing-your-browser-cache and cookies https://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/#clearing-wordpress-com-cookies and then visit your site without logging in you will not see it.
There is an Admin Edit link on posts and pages that only you as Admin and any Editors you have created can see when you are logged in. It’s for your convenience and your visitors cannot see it. You cannot remove it as it’s coded into the theme templates and we cannot edit templates or themes.
The only people who can edit your site are those you provide that ability to. See here https://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/ and here please https://en.support.wordpress.com/email-notifications/
If you log out, clear your browser cache https://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/#clearing-your-browser-cache and cookies https://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/#clearing-wordpress-com-cookies and then visit your site without logging in that links will not appear to you.
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Again, I thank you (timethief, as the acting (but non-staff) representative of WordPress) for your prompt response, but I sure wish that I had been able to find these links with my previous searches. That would have save some time for both of us. I sure feel as though I used a lot of obvious keywords, and also tried longer searches, such as questions.
By the way, some of the links you sent are pretty clearly not relevant. However mostly I think it was a matter of bad luck. If I hadn’t just sent my test computer back to Apple for repairs, then I hope things should have been obvious to me when I looked over there… Right now I’m still feeling kind of overwhelmed and my main concern is more and more with not overwhelming my students.
I just woke up an old Windows box to test it and found things aren’t as bad as they seemed. I think it might help if there were some visible flag or perhaps a background color change to divide the live website from the owner’s view.
It seems that I can mark this question as resolved on the grounds of it being a false alarm.
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Hello again,
I’m happy to help and sorry not all links I provided were relevant.
I believe you were referring to the comment boxes below posts and at the bottom of pages, and if that is the case then the information is auto-filled when one is logged into WordPress.COM but is not seen by other commenters.
Best wishes with your site.
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Hmm… This one (your second reply) seems to call for a separate reply even though I have marked the question as resolved… The contact form is now accessed by the Contact link on the left side. I sent myself a contact mesage, but so far haven’t been able to find where it went… No error message, so it must be somewhere around here, and I’m pretty sure I’ll find it eventually.
The second link (in your second reply) did not appear germane because I wasn’t considering comments, but rather the apparent exposure of my email address from the Contact link. However I’m also worried about comment spam. Normally I enable moderation to prevent that problem, and though I haven’t found the settings to control comment moderation, I hadn’t yet started looking for them. I’m sure they’ll be easy to find, even though some things have been kind of hard to find so far.
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You can read all feedback sent through your contact form in your feedback management area. Just click the Feedback tab in your left-hand menu in WP Admin. https://en.support.wordpress.com/forms/contact-form/#feedback-management
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Hmm… It seems that I can’t fix that typo in my reply. The word “save” should have been “saved”.
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Actually, that reply was kind of misleading, but I eventually managed to find my way over to my email account where the Contact message had arrived. High potential for spam abuse there, but I think I understand the mechanism now… Maybe I’ll have to whitelist my students?
Unfortunately that has led me to a new error message: “There was an error retrieving purchases.” Since I haven’t tried to buy anything, I’m just mystified again and expecting another tricky search trying to figure out what it means… It might be nice if the error messages included a link to their explanations.
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When we need Staff help with issues Volunteers cannot resolve like this one we type modlook into the sidebar tags on our forum threads. I did that for you. Please be patient while waiting. How do I get a Moderator/Staff reply for my question? https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-help-in-the-forums/#how-do-i-get-a-moderatorstaff-reply-for-my-question
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Hi again @shannonjacobs695374035, we use Akismet to filter out the bulk of any spam or abuse that folks might try to send through your contact form.
Also, people who contact you through the form will not see your email address. You will see theirs (if they gave you the right one) so that you can respond to them. And if you do respond to them, they will then see your email, so just be careful about who you respond to and you should be alright.
Let us know if you have more questions on that.
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