Weird followers

  • pviljoen · Member ·

    @kokkieh, thanks!

  • 96isaiah · Member ·

    Hi Happiness Engineers,

    I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one wondering about these suspect, weird email followers. Between January 12 and 14, I have received seven such email followers. Just thought WP would like to know, in case it will help them in some way. You can check them out in my email followers listing.

    I’ve had my posts closed to comments lately, so they won’t be able to add to the mess in that way. Some people just have too much time on their hands.

    Thank you all at WordPress for keeping us safe on the Internet.

  • ebraiter · Member ·

    I guess unlike some others, they came, they followed, maybe they looked around and then they were unfollowed.
    Haven’t received any in the past couple of days.

  • kungfunaomi · Member ·

    Thanks @kokkieh, I haven’t had any e-mail followers since yesterday (thank goodness!)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    @96isaiah,

    I’ve had my posts closed to comments lately, so they won’t be able to add to the mess in that way.

    This “attack” seems to be focusing exclusively on following, not on comments. Comment spam is actually much easier to detect, as there we have an IP address, often a link, and of course the content itself that can all be analysed for potential spam. Our spam filters also “learn”, meaning if a new type of spam makes it through we automatically start blocking it within a few days as long as people mark those comments as spam.

    Closing comments on older posts is a good precaution, though.

    @ebraiter, @kungfunaomi

    Thanks for letting me know this isn’t happening any more for you. Hopefully that means what we’ve been doing on our end appears to be working :)

  • kungfunaomi · Member ·

    @kokkieh okay two more at 5 o clock this morning for my secondary blog. Deleted. My secondary one barely gets any traffic, I post once in a millennia.

  • jazzycookie · Member ·

    Glad to know I’m not an individual target of these weird “follows”…Any idea where the bot is coming from? Or why? I remove them quickly.

  • 96isaiah · Member ·

    @ kokkieh,

    Thank you for that info. Hopefully, we will keep learning. Hope everything goes well in your quest to resolve this. I got one more such email spammer this morning — that’s eight in all now.

  • promotionofliberty · Member ·

    I’m getting the same thing here. Long string outlook email address followers.

  • complexwoman · Member ·

    I, too, have had these random followers pop up lately. I didn’t know which site should be contacted, so I contacted Outlook first. Then came here and was directed to this thread. I don’t know if there’s anything Outlook can do from their end, but it wouldn’t hurt to alert them.

  • catakismet · Member ·

    I have multiple blogs, and it’s getting really tedious to keep logging in and deleting these bogus signups.. I wish the “Happiness Engineers” would figure out a way to block them – that would sure make me happy.

  • drgrcevich · Member ·

    I got six of these followers today, including three in the last two hours. Thanks for looking into this – the notifications were becoming annoying!

  • fitzcarraldoblog · Member ·

    After a day without any of the Outlook.com spam Email Followers, I had three new ones today. The local-part of the address is ‘avisrelillozx’, ‘medinariojacquelinemm’ and ‘torresbymanuelocc’ respectively. I have already Removed them.

  • taraustralis · Member ·

    Also had the same issue. I went though and removed all the @outlook.com accounts. They basically followed over the past three days. It was very sus…

  • bwmedia · Member ·

    Both of my sites are getting these and I was hoping it wasn’t just me. The sad part is anyone who actually has an Outlook email who legitimately wants to follow our sites is getting hurt because someone wants to mess with WordPress’ email server.

  • kungfunaomi · Member ·

    Aiiiii! Got a whole slough of them today. Eleven total. I don’t want to turn off my email notifications because I don’t want them to get my blog posts, but… maybe I just shouldn’t care? I don’t want them to “win”.

  • trailhiker · Member ·

    I guess I’m a little late to the party. I received one outlook.com follower on 1/12, two on 1/13, and the six new followers today 1/16 finally got my attention — all with long unpronounceable “names”. The last four came after I published a post today, within a span of about 2.5 hours. I will now go in and Remove them. But if fixes were in place on 1/15 they are not (yet) working for my blog.

  • earthseedsky · Member ·

    I have been experiencing this same thing: lastnamefirstname-at-outlook email addresses 2 to 4 a day following my blog via email. I have manually removed them.
    Knew it was bogus, but cannot fathom their great scam.

  • nialorre · Member ·

    Lucky me, I get to join the weird outlook followers party.
    This i has never happened before. But I knew something was not right. Glad to see I am not the only one.
    I can’t see what the point is or how this would be a profitable scam.

  • janetchristie · Member ·

    After getting over a dozen odd outlook followers over the last few days I finally decided it was some sort of spam expedition.
    I haven’t figured out how they could “hurt” me by just following, but there are a lot of very smart people out there who don’t do anything but try to figure out how to get something for nothing by taking it from those of us who work for it. So I deleted them from three blogs.
    I’ll stay tuned and hope someone figures out how they want the scam to work and hope at some point they can be identified and blocked automatically.

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