Why do I get accidental comments without (the required) email address?

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Pingbacks/Trackbacks:

This is most likely a harmless case of link notifications to your blog (A) from the other blog (B), where:

  • the comment_author_email field is usually empty,
  • the comment_type field is either pingback or trackback,

  • the comment_author field has the form:

    The title of the post that contains a link to a post of blog A | The site name of blog B

It looks like the blog B has this activated:

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article

and blog A has this activated:

Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)

in the Discussion settings.

Screenshot:

settings

Here’s a description of trackbacks/pingbacks from the Codex.

From the WordPress admin:

Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked
to them. If you link other WordPress sites they’ll be notified
automatically using pingbacks, no other action necessary.

trackbacks

The automatic pingbacks use the XML-RPC protocol to communicate, you can see it for example in the comment_agent field:

The Incutio XML-RPC PHP Library — WordPress/3.9.1

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