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Comments Posted Use "noreply" Email Addresses

Recently, we've noted a number of complaints about Blogger commenting, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken
.My comments all use a "noreply" email address, instead of my actual email address. How do I have people email their replies to my comments?
This appears to be one more way which Blogger is trying to safeguard our Blogger accounts and blogs, from malicious, technically astute blog thieves.

Some time ago, we observed that this precaution appeared to be unique to Blogger accounts which used Google and Google+ profiles - and did not involve Blogger profiles.

It appears that this is now universal, and includes Blogger profiles, as well as Google / Google+ profiles. It's likely that the noreply email addresses are being offered to keep more blog readers from, inadvertently, exposing their email addresses to email mining techniques.

In remembering the long ago discovered "nice blog" spam, it's possible that "nice blog" spam was originally developed to help the spammers gather email addresses, using very innovative technique.

All that a spammer has to do is to post a "nice blog" comment, select "Email follow-up comments to me" - then watch as the Inbox fills up with follow up comments from bloggers, willingly giving up their email addresses to every stranger also selecting "Email follow-up comments to me", in that comment thread.

The people willingly providing their email addresses, to the world in general, are perfect targets for hackers later trying to brute force access to the Blogger accounts, starting from the provided email addresses. Use of the "no-reply" email address prevents this type of mischief - and reduces the workload of Google Security, as they would otherwise have to verify account / blog integrity, for hacked accounts and blogs.

For even more protection (which is not a bad idea, in any case), consider using Google 2-Step Verification, to protect your Blogger / Google account from hacking.

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Comments

this comment, for instance; if i chose email comments back to me, i would have assumed my email was not visible to anyone but the blog's author (you). so if you were to respond to my comment, how would i know unless i received an email from you, or would i have to periodically check your post to see if you responded? just a hypothetical. it's good to know that we have security from would be hacks. thanks.
Nitecruzr said…
Angelina,

When you posted your comment, did you check "Email follow-up comments ..."?

I just did. So now, you reply to this comment.
funny thing happened as i was leaving... i noticed the checkbox with my email address. it was there on previous occasions, but not yesterday until AFTER i had published my comment. hmmmm.

this is edited.just figured out what the problem was. i probably had not signed in yet...the same thing happened just now, and i was not logged in. mia colpa
thank you for following up. angelina
i left a comment earlier this a.m. i guess i did not pass the captcha thing. it's not posted. i figured out what i had done wrong. i was not logged into Google. thanks.
Nitecruzr said…
LOL, Angelina,

The other morning, I made coffee, using my Mr. Coffee, while just waking up.

I connected the coffeemaker to power, filled up the coffeepot with water, poured the water into the water tank, shoved the empty coffeepot under the coffee basket, flipped the switch on, and watched the water drip into the pot.

Then I realised that I had not put the ground coffee into the coffee basket.

D'Ohh!

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