Email Abuse Detection & Blocking

Many healthy site workflows rely on email communication with users: allowing readers to contact them, members to reset their password, new customers to sign up, and communicating the shipping status of an order. While the WP Cloud platform supports these kinds of transactional emails initiated by a user’s actions, contact forms and signups without any protection can cause a site to be used as part of an email bomb attack. Site owners need to be proactive about protecting actions that cause email to be sent.

One of the platform protections that we have is to temporarily block a site’s email from our servers. This action is taken to protect the email reputation of our mail servers, and the block may be lifted once the site has resolved email misuse that is occurring. We’re making a new endpoint, email-block, available to allow WP Cloud clients to periodically monitor sites that have been blocked, and will iterate on this pattern as we receive feedback.

If a site’s email is blocked, we’re happy to work with you to determine what needs to be resolved to remove the block.