My Outlook inbox is suddenly getting a ton of spam and I don't know how to stop it

Yes, I get the "Elon Musk" emails, along with other spam/phishing emails that try to associate themselves to "Costco", "Target", "HomeDepot" and many other well-known companies. All of these spam/phishing emails that have 2 common features that should make filtering these very easy on Microsoft's end.

1. Emails use the name of a well-known company in the subject line, along with unique symbols and emojis to fool the spam filters. None of these companies would ever send an email with these characters in the subject line.
2. Emails try to bypass filters by burying the spam message/offer within an image. Several different emails, from different accounts and with different subject lines appear to use identical images.

It's puzzling that Microsoft, with its AI technology that it promotes to the point of complete annoyance, is unable to train AI to spot these two common features and block these messages. All of us who repeatedly report these messages are doing 50% of the work for Microsoft in terms of a training dataset. In fact, you really don't even need AI. If we are all reporting the above "Elon Musk" email with the same image, just block all emails that use that image. Done.

I guess Nadella is too busy trying to shove the Bing Copilot down everyone's throats, in between firing Blizzard employees and outsourcing AI training to India. Like some others here, I subscribe to Office 365 and expect a bit of service in return.

Hello ! I'm Nelson and I would be glad to assist you today, I'm sorry that you are experiencing this issue.

To block someone in Outlook.com, select the messages or senders you want to block.
From the top toolbar, select Junk > Block (or Spam > Block).
Select OK. The messages you select will be deleted and all future messages will be blocked from your mailbox. Hope this helps

Nelson

Hi Nelson. I am blocking these very many emails as you mention but these spammers have so many different accounts I am still receiving lots of these unwanted emails everyday.

As I have a Yahoo email account that I don't have to pay a subscription for, I am considering cancelling my Microsoft Office account.

No kidding, We all know how to block a specific email but it isn't working on the 150 plus spams I get everyday.

i migrated to another email..im done with msn...everything related. changed my homepage...bill gates can go jump in a lake

As stated in other replies....MS will not do anything about this unless a class action forces them to IMHO.

MS will not assist unless they are forced to, by for instance, a class action being commenced against them.