@matt, from time to time I get an email from a reader mentioning they are unable to subscribe by email to my blog. They say they get an error their IP is not accepted. Any fix?
@matt, please can you look into this? Today again 2 people let me know they could not subscribe to the blog by email, got an IP related message. I’d share a screenshot if I had one …
Sorry for the delay, it’s a little hard to fix this without knowing their particular IP addresses that were blocked. But could you have them try again at this point? It’s possible the block was only temporary.
Blocking IP’s for creating an account or anonymous posting I totally understand.
But blocking IP’s for those wanting to subscribe to blogs by email? There must be a good reason, blinds me.
You’d be surprised at the amount of bots out there and the damage they can do 
One thing they do is crawl all the blogs on our platform and subscribe unsuspecting people, using lists of emails they’ve collected, leading to these people marking the messages as spam. If enough of these messages are marked as spam, all newsletter emails we send may end up in spam. And there are usually a small number of servers all doing this, hence the IP blocks.
So this is one of many protections we have in place against this kind of abuse. But agreed that the IP blocks might be a little too strict right now – you aren’t the first person this has affected.
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Thanks. Email subscribe the suspected IP’s in 2-steps a solution? Like manual validation by the blog owner, or a second page with a question/answer (not google or cloudflare etc captcha)?