I am getting Emails From "Temu." and I Have No Idea What They Are

I’m getting Oprahs picks now the Temu spam emails have stopped, must’ve had 10 already this morning 🤯

Team Microsoft avete risolto il problema?

Io continuo a ricevere decine di email di questo spam ogni giorno nella posta in arrivo.

È imbarazzante

with outlook.live.com

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 from anyone not in my Safe senders and domains list"

these two settings should route all remote content delivery through Outlooks servers and also disable the remote content until you've ascertained whether the email in legitimate or a phishing attempt,

effectively you are disabling pixel tracking that alerts spammers when you open one of their emails,

I add all phishing email senders to my "Blocked senders and domains" list, if phishing emails repeatedly come from variations of an address at the same domain then I block the domain,

these are the formats to use in the block list: "brian123(at)conjob.clam" is an example of a sender address, "conjob.clam" is the senders domain,

usually you can hover over the senders address in the email header and a box with more details will open, if you hover to the far right of the highlighted senders email address an option to copy should appear, simply copy, then with the block list click on the "+Add" to open a box which you can paste the copied address into,

hit the enter/return key and it should be added to the list and a "Save" dialogue box should appear for you to click and confirm the addition,

if you want to block the domain you can edit the entry, just delete the (at) and everything before it,

I then report the email as "phishing" which also deletes it from the junk mail box,

I deleted all redundant contacts, archives, drafts, sent items and deleted items,

even when you empty the deleted folder there is still an option at the top of the folder to "recover items deleted from this folder"

click on that and you open another folder which you can also empty, you might find you have thousands of items in that folder and it takes a while to complete!

spammers use many sneaky methods to track you, pixel tracking, emoticons in the header or senders address that contain hidden code, by deleting all unnecessary stuff from your account you eliminate the possibility they've somehow embedded some web beacon or code in amongst all the rubbish,

I've also opted for these other precautions:

https://outlook.live.com/mail/0/options/mail/handling Read receipts: "Never send a response"

under "Shopping" I've de-selected "For shopping related messages, show a sender logo and relevent links in the message header"

https://outlook.live.com/mail/0/options/general/advertisement Advertising preferences: "Disable all"

with the "Block attachments, pictures and links from anyone not in my Safe senders and domains list" setting active, you'll see a warning at the top of every email with remote content saying:

"Some content in this message has been blocked because the sender isn't in your Safe senders list"

after the warning is:

"I trust content from xyz(at)example.com"

if it is a legit email you can click on this which will add the sender to your Safe senders list and lift the blocking of remote content,

I've been following this regime for a week or so and I've stopped receiving junk mail almost entirely, nothing for 24hrs on two different accounts,

prior to that I got one or two plain text phishing emails a day of the 'Nigerian' variety, rather old skool and rather quaint!

This has been very helpful, I have been doing a lot of those steps already but there are more measures I can take too, form your hints (which I have saved by the way, into a document, so I can pick at the steps)

What would be really handy, but is not available in Outlook, is the use of 'wildcards' ('*') in setting rules - there was one bunch of spammers who used an ever varying syntax of something like '@in.xyz' or '@rdl.abc' -where 'xyz' and 'abc' became infinite variables - a wildcard feature would have been the answer; however I eventually found another way around, as there was some common 'body test' running through the vast majority of that spam wave, so I created a couple of rules and those have now dried up.

Anyway, thanks again - the labour of anti spamming goes on ........

I've had another half day stint of battling the spammers,

but I've learned a few things with the assistance of a kind spirit overseeing this community,

I found a website recommended in an article in the Washington Post, it allows you to check if your email address has been revealed in any data breaches:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

both my hotmail addresses had been involved in multiple data breaches!

then I checked my sign-in activity: Microsoft Account>Security>Sign-in activity>view your sign-in activity

both my hotmail addresses were being involved in unsuccessful sign-in attempts almost around the clock and from all over the world,

really quite shocking, I had to go through thousands of unsuccessful sign-in attempts just to review the activity over the last 30 days,

each address did appear to have had a successful sign-in from an IP address that wasn't mine,

so I changed both my passwords,

I was advised I could create an alias, a new outlook.com address, without deleting my existing account, this could be made my primary identity, linked to my existing account and I could set it as the only address through which to sign-in to my account, whilst disabling my existing hotmail address as a means of signing in,

this defeats the attempts to sign into my account via my hotmail address,

I created an alias for each hotmail address, made it the default sign-in address and disabled sign in from the respective hotmail address,

this is the Microsoft walkthrough I found: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-or-remove-an-email-alias-in-outlook-com-459b1989-356d-40fa-a689-8f285b13f1f2 I then had to enter the new passwords into Thunderbird and also make the new alias outlook addresses the default identities for the accounts to POP to Thunderbird as an email client on my PC,

a bit fiddly to figure out, but it's all working perfectly now,

it also seems as though Outlook has changed the way you can add senders to the 'Blocked senders and domains' list,

currently I can't copy addresses and paste them into the list, it refuses to save them,

but the 'Block' button I've put at the top of my message does enter the sender into the 'Block' list,

you can find the means to customise the buttons here:

https://outlook.live.com/mail/0/options/mail/surfaceActions Message Surface,

I've just got: Reply/Forward/Delete/Report phishing/Block selected by checking their boxes.

never give up, never surrender!