'Followers' with weird email addresses

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  toniop · Member · Jan 18, 2018 at 5:55 pm

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  Recently I have been receiving regularly emails notifying me of [strange email addresses] who are now following my blog. I suspect these are not real people, and I’m wondering if this is a problem or not. Obviously, I would be happy to have more followers, but not bogus mailboxes.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  mommyhive · Member · Jan 18, 2018 at 6:19 pm

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  Hi toniop,

  WordPress.com is aware of this issue and working on it. As part of fixing this they are also removing the spam follows, so you don’t need to remove them manually unless you want to.

  Please see staff reply in the below thread
  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/weird-followers/page/3?replies=49#post-3064901

  Please subscribe to the above thread for updates on this.

  Thank you for your patience.

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  justjennifer · Member · Jan 19, 2018 at 7:28 am

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  Hello there, First of all, please understand that your account and site are safe and until this issue is resolved you may wish to disable your email notifications of new followers. on this page https://wordpress.com/me/notifications Here’s how https://en.support.wordpress.com/email-notifications/

  The current issue is with a sudden influx of spam followers from outlook.com email addresses. If that is what you are experiencing, you’ll also want to read the additional Staff response at https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/weird-followers/page/2?replies=49#post-3064066

  It’s also my understanding from this Staff reply https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/weird-followers/page/3?replies=49#post-3064901 that they are working to remove those spam followers directly from WordPressdotcom so you don’t have to. However, if you feel more comfortable removing them manually, you can do so following our support guide here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/followers/#how-to-remove-a-follower

  As @iamrishaan mentioned, Staff also advised in that thread that they will provide updates to this issue there. If you would like to receive email updates on that topic, you can subscribe to that thread by clicking on the Subscribe to Topic link in that thread’s sidebar.

  If you are experiencing a different issue from the outlook spam followers, please let us know more details. Thanks.