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

You can’t really block your way out of this kind of a problem. Every email address that these phishing spammers send comes from a random series of letters and numbers, and it’s a different unique address every time they spam you. So blocking would block only that address. Unfortunately, it’s a waste of time. It needs to happen at the spam filter in the server level.

That type of phishing, implying a sense of urgency, especially involving an account that is going to be canceled or a package that’s going to be returned to the sender, is designed to get people to panic and click, thinking that they’re about to lose access to their bank or some other valued account. It’s a classic phishing technique.

Look at the addresses that it’s sending to, and the address that sending from. It’s the similar formatting in the address for most of the spam I get. It looks like 90% of my spam comes from the same organization. It’s all phishing and it’s all very annoying.

that's so many junk emails to receive I'm not sure whether to be shocked or impressed!

have you tried all the measures I've been suggesting in my posts?

in a few weeks I'm down from 20 spam a day to 1 or less,

if you genuinely have put in place every measure I suggest and are still getting the same amount of spam then there must be something else I'm doing that I've failed to mention in public, so far,

are you blocking/filtering remote content,

have you checked your account activity to see if there are numerous unsuccessful attempts to access your account from locations and with devices you don't recognise?

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,