Numerous Weird Hotmail Email blog follower notices

  • Unknown's avatar
    psychicjoystar · Member ·

    Hello, What must I do to resolve this and why would it be happening? I haven’t blogged in a while (www.psychicjoystar.wordpress.com) and made a post a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been getting numerous weird Hotmail email address notices sent to my email address about these followers. How do I handle this highly suspicious activity and why might it be happening. Can it be stopped by reporting this as I am doing now? Thanks for any guidance or assistance that you can provide.

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

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    We’re aware of this issue and we’re working to block these spam followers. We cannot just block all outlook.com/hotmail.com emails, though, as that will also block many real people from following your sites, so this isn’t just a quick simple fix.

    I know this is incredibly annoying, but I also want to reassure you that there is no way these spam followers can put your site, your content or your private account data in any danger. It just increases the number of email notifications WordPress.com needs to send out for each new post, so if anything it’s an attempted attack on us trying to overload our email servers, not on your sites or accounts.

    You can remove the spam followers under My Sites > People, but that won’t prevent new follows from coming in. You might also consider temporarily disabling email notifications of new followers in your account settings until we manage to get these blocked. You’ll still see a notification each time in the WordPress.com admin bar, but at least you won’t have your inbox flooded with emails from fake subscriptions.

    Please don’t email these addresses back – another potential reason for this is that someone is fishing for emails which they can then use to try and spam directly, and emailing them back will only provide them with your personal email address – something they cannot get hold of by merely following your site.

    If you have any other questions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

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