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

thing is, I'm getting almost no unsolicited email now, blocking all remotely served content seems to have rendered me invisible to the spammers,

Ok, so it would seem that MS has now admitted there is an issue.... Text from MS reads;

Dean, I want to inform you that it is a global issue which has badly affected our users, and we have already escalated the issue to tier-2 team and our engg. are already working in this issue.

But I also want to inform you that it was recently resolved, but again we are getting this issue, so I can say that we are very close to resolve the issue, but right now we have a solution which has resolved many cases, let me help you on that.

To resolve the issue, we need to reset the junk filters so that we can trigger the server, so that then server will reset the junk filter setting and then your issue will be resolved.

Solution is to go into settings, Email, Junk email, scroll to the bottom of the page, under filters you will have two check boxes. Only trust email from and the other block attachments, pictures blah blah. Check both boxes, click save. Then uncheck both boxes and save... This will apparently reset the server. It may take a while but, according to MS, this resolves the issue......

I've got two hotmail addresses from the early 2000's, I was getting a lot of spam, but I've pretty much stopped it,

do you go online to your email account at outlook.live.com or do you use an email client on your PC?

I have Thunderbird as a client, but I've been signing in online to stop this **** coming through,

settings>email>junk email, at the bottom of the page is 'Filters' tick the box for: "Block attachments, pictures and links from anyone not in my Safe senders and domains list"

the spammers use invisible gifs, pixel trackers, embedded in the email, when you open the email to block or report or delete it Outlook fetches any remote content like images so it can display the email, when outlook collects the pixel tracker from the spammers server they know you've opened the email and your address is active, they send more, they share your address,

using this image blocking filter you quarantine all the emails not in your Safe senders list, you'll see a message at the top of all the emails saying: "Some of the content in this message has been blocked because the sender isn't in your Safe senders list"

now go to: settings>email>customise actions, under the 'Message surface' section check the boxes for "Report phishing" and "Block"

these buttons now appear at the top of the email you have open,

'Block' adds the junk/spam/phishing emails address to your 'Blocked senders and domains' list permanently blocking them,

'Report phishing' reports the sender to Microsoft, it also deletes the message,

I've been blocking the sender and reporting the message as phishing, hence I copy the senders address and paste it into the blocklist manually, the block button will result in deleting the message before I can report it for phishing,

if you get lots of emails from the same domain but with variations in the senders name you can block the entire domain, just edit the email address from example@example.com to example.com in the block list and anything from example.com will be blocked,

I've been doing this to every spam email I receive for about a week and I'm down to only 1 or 2 spam mails a day now, it was more like 10 or 20 a day,

Why not?

Let's say Microsoft allowed us to block (not just sending to Junk Folder, but completely reject) all emails containing the word "keto" - that's a few percent of my SPAM gone.

Likewise, "crypto", "Trump", "Biden", "AI", "tinnitus", "ukrainian girls", etc.

No legitimate email that I would ever want to receive would contain any of those words.

If the email bypsses this by being in the form of an embedded image - again, the email is automatically blocked (although translation apps can read text from images, so it should still be possible).

At least we have the tools to try and fight this, rather than Microsoft meekly surrendering on our behalves.

I have had my Hotmail address since 1998 and it is the login for over 500 websites, but it is now ruined by 200+ SPAM per day.

And before you blame me, it was compromised by the LinkedIn hack years ago, so I didn't even mess up.

Microsoft is complicit in this.

I cannot find the private message option. My email is exploding with spam which is going into my regular inbox. Any way to fix this?