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

this is interesting and disturbing at the same time,

I'm glad that you have managed to escape the spamming, but I'm very uncomfortable about you having to pay to achieve this,

your data was gathered without your explicit consent,

the data gathered about you was sold on and used maliciously against you,

you have now paid to have that data taken down,

it's like an extortion scam but with this company coming in and saying "we know how to fix your problem, but at a price"

if you can request the data be taken down you ought not have to pay and the grounds under which these companies hold your data seem rather shaky, a presumption of consent because they managed to obtain the data, yet the data was obtained without your explicit knowledge so how can one presume that to be consent?

if Microsoft cared about it's customers and it's reputation it would approach these databrokers and demand that all email addresses from a Microsoft domain be erased from their records under threat of legal action,

frankly these databrokers are vermin, parasites feeding off loopholes in the law and gaps in internet security and legislation,

if anyone is a lawyer who fancies taking on a class action against these slime and suing them out of business I'd like to be the first to sign up.

Thank you for the information.

Levi,

Since you are using Outlook then you should find the following website and topics of interest:

www.slipstick.com 

https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/email/how-to-block-foreign-spam/ https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/rules/create-rule-delete-spam-sender-address/

https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/email/meeting-request-spam/

https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/rules/autoreplying-spammers/

https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/junk-email-filtering-isnt-working-in-outlook/

I'm not going to argue with anything you said,

I think all these big IT Corporations kinda need spam because it makes up 90% of all email traffic and it also creates a whole new sector of 'solutions for spam'

without spam a lot of people simply wouldn't have a job and the Holy GDP would go down along with the Holy Stock Market.

they live for today with no eye for the future,

I wonder if people will just give up on email as being more trouble than it's worth, walk away,

certainly online advertising, a la Google Ads has become so toxic the FBI recommends using an adblocker, https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-fbi-now-recommends-using-an-ad-blocker-heres-why

the entire IT industry is built on monetisation of data and advertising, if everyone starts using adblockers because it's the only way to protect yourself from malicious scamsters, the entire business model of IT will implode,

I think they're in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden egg,

Microsoft are actually in the process of ramping up their monetisation strategy, https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collection-service at some point their customer base is going to say 'enough is enough' and walk away,

remember what happened to Kodak when digital cameras became ubiquitous, big corporations can go the way of the Dodo pretty quickly.