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

Anonymous
2023-10-11T03:47:38+00:00

In the past 2 hours alone, I have received at least a dozen spam emails written in random words. For example “isnt a said tone Then it level in very he possible 54 u443 hkother” They are coming from apparent one-off gmail, live, hotmail, and other accounts. And the so-called junk filters are catching NONE of them. I get most of my email on mobile devices, so I’m not using the desktop Outlook app, and thus I can’t adjust the level of spam filtering. To be honest, I pay for Microsoft 365 and I find it ridiculous that (A) the default outlook.com spam filters are not catching them, and (B) I can’t adjust the spam filter so it does catch them. Microsoft, quit dinking around with AI on Bing and put it to work in your own spam filters!

Outlook | Outlook for mobile | Outlook for iOS | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-12-21T22:34:30+00:00

    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?

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-01-05T00:23:26+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-01-05T00:28:06+00:00

    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.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-01-05T02:02:10+00:00

    I'm sure this question has been asked a hundred times, why isn't Microsoft doing something about it? It is very annoying to say the least, I have tried blocking, report phishing and cleaning out folders such as junk, drafts and deleted folder. Someone has to have a resolution to this.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-01-05T07:18:02+00:00

    I identified that most spam mails, in my case, didn't have a sender address. Then i found this workaround (with rules) that worked out fine for me. It it hard to understand why Microsoft isn't block these kind of messages. Especially when Google do.

    SPAM with NO SENDER EMAIL - Microsoft Community

    But i used the action to move message to a Folder instead of delete.

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