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

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,

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......

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

people don't seem to understand what pixel tracking is:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56071437

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client on my PC,

it blocks remote content for my privacy and if I click on the options it displays the source url for each item of remote content it has blocked in an email,

I'm given the option to allow remote content from that source or continue to deny it,

even Microsoft uses tracking pixels in their emails, you're likely receiving a notification that I've posted this reply, in that email the tracking pixel is the 4 different coloured squares arranged in a square 'logo' that Microsoft uses,

when I block all content not in my safe senders and domains list I deny the loading of these tracking pixels, if the tracking pixel isn't retrieved from the senders server so that it can be displayed as part of the email the sender is unaware that I've opened the email,

because Microsoft has embraced pixel tracking technology and woven it into all of it's Office and email products it's created a huge problem for them,

spammers can use pixel tracking to see which of the emails they send are opened and hence identify 'active' email addresses, my guess is that they then focus on these addresses and also share them amongst other spammers,

the spammers are using exactly the same methodology to track their victims that Microsoft and the corporate community use to track their potential customers,

I've simply said: "enough is enough" and block all attachments, images and links not in my Safe senders and domains list,

this gives me a cloak of invisibility, I can open suspect emails, add the sender to my block list, report it as phishing to Microsoft and then delete it, all without the sender being aware I've even received it,

I've noticed that a week or so ago you couldn't select the option to: Settings>General>Privacy & Data>External Images.... option "Always use the Outlook service to load images"

I tried setting it to that option repeatedly but a save dialogue box would never appear to allow me to comfirm that setting,

now it seems to have miraculously set itself,

Microsoft seems to be forcing all remote content to be served via their Outlook servers so that they can try and monitor the pixel tracking content within emails,

so Microsoft do seem to be reacting to the problem, but secretively, they never seem to admit to any of their mistakes,

I too have been receiving a lot of unwanted emails and i do mean a lot! I have reported them as spam and have even tried blocking them but it seems the more i do that, the more I get. How do I get this nightmare to stop it is getting really aggravating. Please advice or do something on your end to stop this.

r,