Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?

Subject: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Dec 21 - 01:08 PM

I have an email address at msn.com - one of the Microsoft email things along with hotmail and live.com and outlook.com and whatnot.

It had been very good at filtering out Spam, and then all of a sudden about 2 weeks ago, I got a huge surge of Spam in my inbox that was not being sorted into the junk folder. Anybody know why that happened, and how I can tighten security to stop that flow of Spam?

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Dec 21 - 02:59 PM

I have the same issue (I also have an msn.com). For the last two or three weeks my inbox has been inundated by stuff mostly from the States: Medicare, insurance, senior savings, TV retailers, that sort of thing. I'm constantly "unsubscribing" from stuff I've never subscribed to in the first place, to little avail. A couple of weeks ago I tried to find out how to toughen up my spam settings but without success. Help!

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Dec 21 - 10:35 PM

It sounds like a glitch on the Microsoft end of things. I've seen this happen in different email providers over the year. Typically the company figures out where the glitch is and fixes it. Microsoft handles a lot of the university email from where I worked (they also handle it for many other schools and corporations) - I predict that one day soon this will clear up.

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 11:46 AM

Has the spam influx slowed? I just took a look at my Hotmail account, it doesn't seem to have that problem.

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 12:26 PM

$mas.

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 06 Dec 21 - 10:54 PM

At last count, I have been receiving about 100 per day, including political begs.

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: Mr Red
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 04:11 AM

I'm constantly "unsubscribing" from stuff I've never subscribed to in the first place
Surely if you didn't contact them in the first place, unsubscribing merely confirms you are a real person. And now everyone has your e-mail. The spammers may be speculative but they are street smart. No reply of any sort may be a dead e-mail account, and will be dropped. IME

Subject: RE: Tech: Surge of Spam on Outlook - why?
From: DaveRo
Date: 07 Dec 21 - 04:27 AM

Agreed. Only unsubscribe if you recognise the site as one you trust, and might plausibly have accidently subscribed to, or failed to decline news from.

If it's certainly spam, don't even open it. Doing that can alert the sender that it's reached a real address by fetching images - 'web beacons'. That will ensure you get more.

Better still, use a mail reader that ignores such images, and other tricks, and just shows you the text until you confirm it's genuine. Thunderbird does that.