Weird followers
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I guess I’ll add myself here to this long list of other websites with the same issue. Like others have said, it’s good to have found this forum and I look forward to hearing what WP will be doing about it.
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Been happening to me, too, so I did a search and found this group. Happy to know it’s not a personal thing – I started to wonder who I’d pissed off – lol! So annoying.
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Think I got a total of 10 or something, and it started on January 12. Weird… It’s not that they can actually hurt the sites, but it’s spamming and annoying to have to delete them every single time they appear. Just deleted two new ones (it’s morning here), so they’re quite active :D
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At least now that I know what’s been going on I won’t be bending my husband’s ear every time I get one of these weird emails!
I’ve been deleting them from my followers anyway but it’s good to know I’m not the only one getting them 😊
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Just received another 3 new dodgy outlook follows this morning for my site, so they’re definitely still at it. I think I’m up to 11 now. Please add my site to those affected. Thanks.
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I’m getting two or three a day, strangely just after I make a posting usually. I was concerned I’d made some personal information public so I am relieved it is a known problem.
I’m hopeful that it will be filtered out soon. Meantime I’m ignoring them. -
We started getting these a few days ago, just as we decided to archive the two blogs affected and start a new one, epic fail by wanna-be-spammers! We also removed the ‘follow’ button, and haven’t included it on our new blog, as it appears they must be manually clicking it to add themselves.
Just so relieved to know it’s not just us!
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I’m so glad there are so many other people on here saying this. I’ve never had this before and was finding it really weird!
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I’ve gotten about nine of them since Saturday (the latest one 20 minutes ago), so I’m glad I’m not the only one! I was finding it super strange. Guess I’ll just remove my email follow button and delete them manually for now.
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I am having this issue as well. about 17 new email only followers within three days. I have a personal plan on here and I use a .com email address. Would this have anything to do with it? Or is it a WordPress wide problem?
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I mark the followers as spam in my gmail account as and when they come up and have stopped worrying about it – the Happiness Engineer said no harm can come to our sites unless we email back directly and so be targetted with direct spamming of probably worse proportions. I’ll now stop following this thread.
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Ditto – same experience as everyone else. At least I know that it’s being investigated and unlikely to be a big issue for my blog.
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Just came online to figure out what these strange new Outlook followers were all about… glad to hear that I am not alone on this subject. I’ve gotten about 8 (and counting) on one of my blogs in the last couple of days. Hopefully, WP will be able to do something about them. Can’t quite figure out what on earth they have to gain…
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Hello… I’ve also been experiencing a highly unusual amount of e-mail subscribers over the last couple of days from outlook.com. I’ll confess that I haven’t as yet read through the entirety of this thread, but is it mere coincidence that this thread began around Jan 16th 2018? Because that’s when my first spurt of outlook ‘follows’ began. I’m no computer expert, so I’ll ask, is this representative of some widespread email/spam ‘attack’ here?
The blog all these emails are ‘subscribing’ to isn’t a hugely read, super popular site so the sudden barrage of ‘followers’ has got me suspicious… I received two on Jan 16th, three the following day (one of which was an identical email address to the previous day), and three so far today (Jan 18th). I’m perfectly happy to share these outlook addresses on this thread if it helps at all….
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Thanks to Time Thief for the link on how to get rid of these weird “followers”.
I’m not sure what they aim to achieve-maybe it’s just to see if the email address is active.
But I’m deleting them anyway -
Glad to know I am not alone. Been deleting them as they come in…so far, between all my blogs, I’ve counted over 50 of them!
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I too have been receiving the odd Outlook follower notification. When I went to my site, I did not see them on my list of followers. For me, it seems like it was “just” an email attack – Is this true for anyone else? I changed my password on the site because it seems like this was a breech of some sort.
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