Spammy follows from @outlook.com email addresses

  • joshlangleyauthor · Member ·

    Thank you, hopefully the issue is fixed soon. I keep getting excited that someone new is following my blog, when in fact it’s only spammers.. sad..

  • tidbits13 · Member ·

    Thanks for being on top of this, I have a small account that I have not been posting much too recently so I appreciate the behind the scenes work!

  • ihatehate · Member ·

    Aww, and I thought I had got more readers. Gutted!!

    Not really! ;) The random-string usernames tipped me off that something was fishy about this. Thank goodness I didn’t reply to thank these artificial fans, otherwise some luser would be brute-forcing my email account!

  • kaydartnell · Member ·

    Thanks for explaining..and acting

  • mocosoco · Member ·

    Getting one to two of them daily. I’m glad I found this thread; wasn’t paying attention to all the subscription activity until I noticed all of the outlook.com addresses.

  • dblossomgurl · Member ·

    We’re in the month of May and I’m still getting at least 4 to 5 outlook spam followers per week.

    Is this a new influx or the same one?

  • tasara · Member ·

    I am affected big time. Thanks for your work on this.

  • paigepb · Member ·

    I don’t care about the email notification about a follower, I care about a follower of my blog with false intention and can I remove them?

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Please read the Staff reply at https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/spammy-follows-from-outlookcom-email-addresses/#post-3092975 Staff are removing these followers on your site behind the scenes so you don’t have to.

    For anyone who is getting email notifications and would like to turn them off until this current wave of spam followers is over, to disable those notifications completely by changing your settings here: https://wordpress.com/me/notificationsClick the arrow on the right and uncheck the box next to Site follows > Email.

    If you don’t want to disable email notices of all new followers, see if your email program will allow you to create a filter to flag notifications of outlook followers and have those messages completely skip the inbox, going directly to archive or trash.

    Hope that helps somewhat.

  • amzolt · Member ·

    Well, a few weeks back it look like WordPress had half the problem solved:
    I was getting the email notifications; but, WordPress was removing them form my follower list.

    Since yesterday, even that half of the solution is gone:
    Getting notifications and the addresses are in my followers list…

    Wondering why it’s so hard to master this fix…?

  • amzolt · Member ·

    Another thought…

    What if there are innocent folks using outlook to follow?

    Are they automatically deleted along with the bad ones?

    Well, deleted when WordPress gets that part working again…

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi folks,

    Sorry about the silence – it seems during the recent forums upgrade this thread got removed from our staff queue, so we missed the more recent replies.

    We are still working on blocking these. But as long as you don’t send an email to thank them for following your blog, these follows pose no risk at all to either your site or your account.

    I also recommend you disable email notifications of new followers for now under Settings ->Discussion – you will still receive notifications in the admin bar and via the mobile app’s push notifications about new followers, so you shouldn’t miss any notifications about real followers. Or you can set up an email filter to automatically delete new follower notification emails that mention an @outlook.com email.

    What if there are innocent folks using outlook to follow?

    That is why we cannot just block all outlook emails – that would block legitimate followers as well. But the addresses being used here are seemingly random, and not following a fixed pattern we can just block either. The developer working on this is very good at fighting spam, though. He just needs time to figure this one out.

  • cygnusstudiosflorida · Member ·

    Count me in as also noticing a big uptick lately in emails notifying me of new followers from outlook.com. They must be bots, since the vast majority of them never show up on my email followers list.

    That indicates they never responded to the follow confirmation email, which may be a good method of identifying bots by cross-referencing the followers list to the non-responders.

    Anyway, just a thought!

  • rappolee58 · Member ·

    I like your “outlook” on life

    I have been ignoring these daily adds to my wordpress

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi cygnusstudiosflorida and rappolee58,

    Thank you for reporting this. We’re already working on removing those spam followers from your sites.

  • slmpblog · Member ·

    I, too, am still receiving these on a daily basis, but I also recently noticed something strange. I haven’t been posting much to my blog but suddenly May 24th had 69 visits to my blog site. I had not posted that day, nor done any advertising to drive people to it. The visits rather stands out on my site stats: https://sandyparks.wordpress.com/
    Being suspicious by nature, I’m wondering if it has something to do with all these strange sign ups (I received another of those today).

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