Do you mean that you’re getting SPAM on your sites comments, or that you’re getting SPAM emails sent to your email box?
Akismet only protects against comment SPAM. If SPAM’ers get your email address through any other means (even guessing which a lot do) they can send as many emails as they like to that email address. That has nothing at all to do with WordPress and is a matter for your hosting company or email provider.
Or are you saying the spam is reported as coming from wordpress@ iexcelbooks.no? Have you seen the actual message content? This is the default From: address your WP installation uses to send various notifications to admins and authors. If this is the sort of content in the email, you need to add this address to your contacts so it does not get tagged as spam.
If the content is actually spam, you may have a bigger problem. Some hacker could be using your server to send out spam with this From: address. Or a spammer has spoofed your system email address and is sending spam from elsewhere. There’s little you can do about this latter variant other than post a message explaining what’s happening and why you cannot do anything about it. To determine which variant it is, you need to examine the email header of the message to see where the email actually originated. This is more complicated than it sounds, but there are several articles online explaining what to look for.
If spam email is actually coming from your server, see FAQ My site was hacked.
Thread Starter
Tonje1
(@tonje1)
Thanks for your reply. To clearify what the problem is:
We have registration form for new members and our member database in aMember. This registration is working perfectly, and we have no problems at all with the member registration and database in aMember.
In mid June we started to get emails. The new type of emails have folowong informaion
FROM: WordPress <wordpress@iexcelbooks.no> via goodwood.domeneshop.no (domeneshop is our web host)
TO: xxxxxxxx@iexcel.no
FROM: goodwood.domeneshop.no (our web host)
SUBJECT [Regnskap] New User Registration ( “Regnskap” is the name we use on our site )
TEXT: New user registration on your site Regnskap: Username: Sharyl4128 E-mail: chianeselim@ hotmail.com (WHICH IS A SPAM BOT)
We are not aware direct negative influences from the spambots, but find it very annoying that they are able to register into a database in our portal.
The questions are:
Into what database do the spambots register? Is it a native WP database or could it be a plugin?
Where and how can we locate this “hidden” database from WP-admin?
Is there a risk that the spambots can do any harm? (like slowing down our site or put malware into it)?
How can we prevent spambots from registering in this database and with a registration type we do not know about?
Can we disable the entire database and just use the database for members we have in aMember?
(there is no content to the email, only registration)
Appreciate insight on this…Thanks
If ‘xxxxxxxx@iexcel.no’ replaces a real email address associated with an administrator account, the email appears to be a legitimate system message sent when anyone registers on your site, legitimate or spammer. You can turn this feature off, but if you are not getting a lot of registrations, it serves as a warning of a spam attack.
All new registrations are entered in the user table, spammer or legitimate both. What spambots can do to your site depends on what the default role is for new registrations. If it is ‘Subscriber’ the only thing they can do is bloat your DB with more registrations, a subscriber can do nothing but look at content.
How you prevent spammer registrations depends on the nature of your site. You can require all registrations be placed in a moderation queue so no one can register without moderator approval. Or you can close all registrations and use some other mechanism to request membership, which a moderator then manually adds to the DB if everything checks out.
While Askimet is for protection from comment spam, the registration data could be checked against their data, there’s a good chance spammer registrations are also comment spammers. There may be a plugin that does this, or it may need to be custom coded.
If the nature of your site requires open registration, you could apply some of the other anti comment spam techniques to the registration process. There are a lot of similarities.
Ah, you’re getting SPAM registrations. That’s not the same as SPAM emails, or SPAM comments. They are basically the same, but there’s different solutions for each one.
As far as users, to the best of my knowledge, AMemeber uses the standard WordPress membership functions and storage and it just adds some new fields and functions to it. There won’t be any separate membership storage area.
The plugin that I’ve used successfully in the past is WangGuard. It seems to be doing the job so far so may be worth a look.
