Email being used to make accounts on random sites

  • Unknown's avatar
    dazseaton · Member ·

    I woke up this morning and noticed a ton of emails saying I had new accounts with random wordpress webites. Its slowed down at the moment but its totalling in the thousands currently. Why is this happening and how can I get it to stop?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What is the FROM address on those emails? If they are not from donotreply[at]wordpress.com, they are not being sent from our system.

    I’ve also checked the email address on file for this account. We have not sent any emails to that address recently.

    This tells me what is most likely happening is that someone is using your email to add you as a user on multiple self-hosted WordPress websites. I’ve had another user report something similar a couple of weeks ago.

    Self-hosted sites are not in our control, and we have no way of preventing this. My only suggestion is to set up a filter in your email client to automatically delete/mark as spam emails containing common words from the subject lines of the emails you’ve already received. If the emails are all from the same @domain(s) you can also try reporting them to whoever is hosting those domains, as this type of thing is against the terms of most hosting and email providers.

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