Why am I suddenly getting so many spam emails on outlook.com from an apparent AI bot?

When is Microsoft going to put an end to this insanity. I have just received 219 emails in my Junk folder and a few more in my Inbox. Maybe Microsoft should hire some of these hackers to work for them, so they can combat the hackers out there. Just a thought!

I was getting a lot of spam, but I've approached the problem from several angles and it seems to have worked, out of two old hotmail accounts I've only had one spam message in the last 36hrs, a couple of weeks ago it would have been 20 per day to each account,

I've only one rule set on one of the accounts, but so far I've not had a message that triggers it, so it's not through rules that I've stopped this spam, it's at a deeper level,

my approach has been to reduce my visibility to spammers,

I suspected that some sort of web beacon might be buried in a spam email in my account giving the spammers something to home into, so I had a spring clean of my account,

I deleted redundant contacts, emptied my drafts, sent items, junk email and deleted items folders,

then at the top of the now empty deleted items folder is "recover items deleted from this folder"

click on that and it opens an additional folder containing everything you thought you'd already purged from your account, I emptied that folder and that finally separated me from all that past junk,

next step, disable remote content in received messages to quarantine any pixel tracking so that I could handle messages without tipping off the sender that my account was active and their email had arrived and been viewed,

see my reply to MarieRoseAmanda's post above, I won't duplicate the steps again here,

having disabled remote content until the messages had either been confirmed as safe and added to the Safe senders list,

or confirmed as unsafe and added to the Blocked senders list and deleted, I was still receiving spam, less spam but I was still being targeted,

this is where I then looked at whether my address had been exposed to spammers in the past and whether it was of interest to spammers in the present,

again, in the reply to MarieRoseAmanda above I describe how I checked to see if my email had been in a data breach and also if I was being subjected to a lot of unusual sign-in attempts from IP's that obviously weren't mine,

by deploying an alias I've stopped all the unusual and thankfully unsuccessful attempts to sign in to my accounts, when a spammer tries to hack into my accounts by the previous email address I used as a sign in credential they get a response "there is no account associated with this address"

so I've made myself as invisible as possible, both my leaked email addresses now come up as no longer existing if they try to hack into them and if they spam me their remote content is disabled so they get no encouraging feedback via their tracking pixels and embedded links that my account is active,

I've also been building up my active blocking list adding the sender of any junk that does arrive in my accounts,

this genuinely seems to have worked, for me, I now intend to carry on with this email hygiene regime,it's totally manageable now,

I've had the same problem for months I even spent an entire day at my desktop adding filters reporting senders and blocking but it's pervasive just gets worse.

the 'Block' button is a better option because it adds the sender to your Blocked senders and domains list,

but some of these verminous spammers have figured out a way to disable the Block button and also stop the email in Outlook showing it's sender,

you can find the sender in the message source, but it is time consuming,

I POP my hotmail to Mozilla Thunderbird installed on my PC as an email client, you can see who the sender is in Thunderbird when it isn't visible in Outlook, I copy the address in Thunderbird and manually paste it into the Block list in Outlook,

thing is, why are you geting so many phishing messages a day,

you can set your filters to block remote content, that should disable pixel trackers and stop tipping off the spammers that you've received the email,

https://outlook.live.com/mail/0/options/general/export External images: Always use the Outlook service to load images,

https://outlook.live.com/mail/0/options/mail/junkEmail Filters: Block attachments, pictures and images from anyone not in my Safe senders and domains list

'allow trusted senders' in your inbox with the option at the top of the message, that puts them in the safe sender list,

'block' the phishing emails with the Block button in your junk mail box, adding them to the block list,

you might want to check your email with this website to see if it's been leaked in a data breach:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ if it says your email has been leaked in a data breach you ought to go check for unusual sign-in activity,

microsoft account>security>sign-in activity>view sign-in activity,

I checked mine and I had an endless stream of unsuccessful attempts to sign into my email account from locations all over the world,

it was suggested I create an alias, it's an additional email address that you then make your primary identity in your account and then make it the sole identiy for signing in,

it stops people being able to try and break into your account because your original email address will give the result "no account for this address exists"

your mailbox and it's contents are unchanged, you can send and receive with your original email address, you use the alias purely for signing in and never give it out as a contact,

this is an article explaining it in microsoft speak:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-or-remove-an-email-alias-in-outlook-com-459b1989-356d-40fa-a689-8f285b13f1f2

one other thing I did was have a real spring clean of my account, I deleted any redundant contacts, superfluous messages in my inbox,

I then emptied my Drafts, Sent items, Junk mail and Deleted items folders,

then at the top of the deleted items folder there is "recover items deleted from this folder" click on that and another folder opens with everything you thought you'd already got rid of,

some people are shocked at the number of items in it, empty that folder and you'll have purged a whole load of unwanted stuff from your mailbox, including a lot of deleted phishing emails laden with toxic code, web beacons and files with malware inside,

I was getting 20 phishing emails a day and I got irritated enough to take action, the stuff above is what I've done and it is down to one or two spam a day now.

but yes, microsoft does need to get on the case, examining the message sources of phishing emails it's apparent that they go through a whole series of outlook exchanges and servers before getting dumped on you to deal with,

instead of faffing around with filters they should be more pro-active and identify the sending accounts and IP's and either blacklist them or get them shut down,

the spammers seem to have access to all the state of the art software and network infrastructure, they're probably even using AI, it has the feel of an automated system that won't stop until someone pulls the plug on them.

anyway, best of luck,

never give up, never surrender!

I am getting 25+ emails in my junk folder. I feel I need to scan this folder daily in case legitimate emails are going there since my inbox is limited to safesenders. IAnd I can no longer report them as phishing - that tab is grayed out. It is troubling that Microsoft cannot stop this when you are one of the largest tech companies in the world. I also have a gmail account which by the way only gets one or two spam emails a day.