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

I noticed this,

changing settings for the Filters at the bottom of the Junk email page sometimes don't 'stick'

when you change a setting a 'save' dialogue box should open which you click on to save the new setting,

I was trying to change the setting; General>Privacy & Data>External images, there are two options, I wanted the one " Always use the Outlook service to load images"

initially trying to change that setting wouldn't trigger a save dialogue box to appear and the setting change would never stick,

I came back to it recently and it seemed to have set itself!

so persist, maybe it takes a while for the updated setting to reach it's destination on the server, I've stuck to these two individual settings,

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 links not in may Safe senders and domains list

the other thing I noticed was even after deleting all drafts, sent messages and deleted items, they still lurk in a 'recover items deleted from this folder' folder at the top of the deleted items folder,

click on that coloured text and it opens another folder you can empty entirely,

I must have purged hundreds of items from my account and the amount of storage on the Cloud reduced noticably,

if you have huge numbers of things saved in this folder it can take several minutes for them to be deleted, just be patient or do blocks of 50 at a time,

so yeah, there is a time lag between changing settings and deleting stuff, you have to allow the MS servers a bit of time to work through it all and keep persisting, going back the next day and seeing if your setting have stuck, re apply as necessary,

I've been doing a lot of searching and reading online about spammers,

you know those emoticons that the spammers seem to like adding lots of to the header of their emails?

well it seems as if they might actually be hiding code embedded inside them,

this is why I've purged everything possible I didn't want from my accounts, to erase the possibility of any sort of beacon lurking in there,

after adding a sender or domain to the block list, reporting the email as phishing, I then delete it and also clear the 'recover items' folder,

a real 'zero tolerance' policy, I don't claim to fully understand all the devices they use to plague us with their pestilential spam, but I can use a 'scorched earth' approach to sxterminate any trace of their visits to my account.

'scorched earth' approach, love it 😂

Deleted, deleted folder completely empty now. If you consider this folder (the recover deleted folder) automatically deletes deleted emails after 10 days, I had 1,470 odd deleted emails so that goes to show how many spam emails I was receiving. I will see what it is like tomorrow regarding MS server catching up with applied settings. Still, not one spam email since I applied those settings and cleared my "recover deleted" folder! 😁

It works fine when using gmail spamfilter instead (for the same mail address). In gmail the spam mails ends up in their spam folder. As it should be.

LMAO, MICROSOFT email suck! On one of my hotmail accounts I received 1132 junk emails in 3 days! BLOCKING them only seems to spawn more! I use a GMAIL for my banking & online shopping, because MICROSOFT sucks & is nothing but SPAM & SCAM! I get ZERO just mail on my GMAIL account!