Weird email Subscription

@ashlyc1983
please see the following post:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/russian-spam-is-back-again

which dates back to https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/mail-ru-spam-again

Ok thank you. I saw the .ru that was on other threads but wasn’t sure if it was the same issue because mine had an actual gmail address. Although the part in front of the @ sign was numbers, which was weird. I am assuming because they keep bypassing new security measures, they are probably adopting gmail accounts now. I appreciate the response because I didn’t see the thread that discussed them changing domain names.

Hi @ashlyc1983 and @sloth,

In Email Subscribers Free we have taken care of the majority of security issues. But still, there could be a few ways that surpass our security measures.
To combat that, you could try out Email Subscribers Premium which had the CAPTCHA feature. It helps achieve 100% security.
Hope this helps you.

A CAPTCHA would only help when using the form to subscribe, correct? These people aren’t using a form to sign-up for a subscription. How would a CAPTCHA help in this case?

Hi, the team is working on the issue and this issue should be completely resolved in the next version of the plugin.

Thank you, team, for working on this issue. For at least my bogus subscriptions, the email address is non-existent. You may already be doing this, but a possible approach in addition to the steps you are already taking might be to send an SMTP VRFY command to the address right up front, and if an error is returned immediately stop processing the subscription request. If it is being done through the form, you could present an error dialog; otherwise silently ignore it.

Again, thanks for the plug-in and your continued work on it for our benefit.

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll update the team about the same.

Thank you again.

FYI, The amount of fake subscribers I am getting has actually increased since the last plugin update. I was only getting maybe 2-3 per day, now I am deleting about a hundred per day.

Ditto, but it may be coincidence with just a larger number of attacks being launched.

No fake subscribers today. Looks like the issue is fixed. Thank you.

Hi All,

We have released an updated version of Email Subscribers which fixes the issue of SPAM subscribers. Please update your Email Subscribers which will resolve the issue.