Spammy email subscriptions

  • alexskunz · Member ·

    Hello,

    I’m getting notifications for new email subscriptions from some randomized usernames ALL THE TIME and it is totally getting on my nerves. ALL of these subscriptions come from <localpart>@laposte.net where <localpart> is always some randomized nonsense like grumpyaccuser35bb3.

    Am I the only one?

    I don’t want to disable the email notifications for new follows entirely, but I’d sure like to simply block subscription by email from this domain entirely – is there a way to do that?

    Thanks
    Alexander.

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

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I only see two confirmed subscriptions in the past week from @laposte.net addresses. Have you removed the rest? Keep in mind that if you receive the email notification, it means the other person not only subscribed to your site, but also confirmed the subscription. Spam followers as a rule don’t go to that much trouble, so there is a chance that these are legitimate subscriptions. Did you recently publish anything that would prompt readers from France to follow your site?

    Laposte.net is a French webmail provider, like Gmail or Yahoo, so we cannot block signups from that domain as we’ll be blocking thousands of existing WordPress.com users should we do that.

    One thing you could do is to report those addresses to laposte.net directly. If someone is using their service to spam-follow you like this they’ll be able to tell if the signups are coming from the same IP address, and this kind of behaviour will likely be against their terms of service in which case they can act against the person doing this.

    You can also set up a filter in your email account to automatically delete any incoming emails containing that domain. That way you won’t need to completely disable notifications, but you won’t constantly be receiving these ones.

  • alexskunz · Member ·

    Hello & thanks for the reply. Yes, I deleted the other subscriptions already. Seems like it has stopped at the moment, maybe someone at laposte.net already pulled the brake.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Thanks for letting me know :)

  • alexskunz · Member ·

    Too soon. I got more of those nonsense subscriptions yesterday.

    I removed the “Follow by email” widget from the site for now to see if it makes any difference. (it’s not exactly an important blog;-)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Removing the widget can help, though people can still sign up via the action bar on your site. That’s a less obvious option, though.

    Also keep in mind my suggestion about setting up a filter in your email account. That will let the emails bypass your inbox and whoever is doing this can tire themselves out without you getting constant email notifications.

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