How do I weed out spam website followers from my mail inbox?

What you’re encountering is just a fact of life when it comes to email lists. You could spend your whole day trying to weed out fake followers, but there’s really no efficient way to do it, and therefore no point to it.

The fact of the matter is, a fake follower can’t do anything to you except receive your emails, and really what’s the harm in that? ??

Thanks for responding to my quest James.
What do you think is a sure sign of a false follower email? I thought perhaps its a name with mostly numbers and not a proper recognized name.
Anyway what I tried to do, to filter emails, was to copy their name and paste in in search (Microsoft 8.01). This bought up some internet sites that contained their name or something similar. This helped about one percent of the time, but with this method, you can’t be positive its the same person who sent you the email.
Yes, I also wondered why register as a follower, in the first place, if the spammers only received notification of your new blogs!

What do you think is a sure sign of a false follower email?

It’s hard to tell really, in 10 years, I have yet to come up with a formula I’m comfortable with.

For example, my old formula used to be anyone with a site that wasn’t similar in interest to mine. Then again, what if this foreign exchange broker is a legitimate person who actually enjoys my blog? See what I mean?

In the end, the *worst* they can do to you is receive your blog posts via email. So, my conclusion on the matter these days is, why even judge in the first place? ??

There’s a very easy way to find out if they are legitimate email addresses. Send out emails.

Seriously, that’s all there is to it.

If they are not valid addresses they’ll bouce back and you can remove these from your list. If they are valid, but by people that don’t want to recieve your messages they’ll opt out, and again you can remove that from your list. The rest, they’ll keep on getting your messages until they decide that they don’t want to.

You know what, I’ve come to the same conclusion as you, James and Catacaustic.
Instead of faffing about it all, I downloaded the plugin ‘MailPoet’ and left it as that. Very simple plugin that sends out your newsletters for you.
Thanks folks for kindly responding to my request. You are the greatest.

You’re welcome!