Not sure I’m in the right zone - please redirect me if there is a more suitable place to be!
The last eight months or so my Hotmail inbox has been smashed. Far more than ever ever before - about 50 spam a day. That’s not a lot by some standards but when you have to manually sort them out from your real email, it grows quite tiresome.
I don’t know what’s caused the sudden surge in spam, but more concerning is that Microsoft/Hotmail don’t appear to have a single goddamn thing to fight against it.
They have the “block all but safe senders” option, a “block these senders” option, and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE. There appears to be absolutely zero automatic spam filtering option with the familiar levels (none, low, high, safe senders only). As a result, my good old Hotmail is becoming nigh unusable.
Am I overlooking something really obvious? Has this sudden flare-up of spam happened to anyone else in the last year? Is there some wonderful button I can press that will bring me back to the glory days of relatively spam-free existence?
Thanking you in advance.
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Hijacking this guy’s. I pay for an basic personal subscription and my spam filter is a complete joke. Is there any adjustments I can do myself to improve it?
The best option is always going to be the manual one. I copy and paste the domain of anything I want gone. I’ve had too many important things where they were determined to be spam and finding them was just too much of a pain.
You can make a new Gmail account without worrying about changing email address for everyone etc. Just forward your Hotmail to your new Gmail account, and Gmail will filter the spam for you.
The Outlook.com spam filter sucks.
Use the block all but safe senders option - I started using it and it’s amazing. Most e-mails that come to me, I’m already expecting, so if I haven’t already added someone to safe senders I can easily open junk and do it.
I rarely have had to do that after the first day or two of marking domains as safe.
Microsoft has had some big problems in general recently. One actually is that it’s sending encrypted emails like OTP or verification links to quarantine (so too much filtering) another is a big issue with azure, so lots of people failing SSO sign ins, and now we have not enough filtering! Tsk tsk MS
Yeah my spam filter is the same. Only started happening few weeks ago and now it’s trash and letting through obvious trash.
I use it for bills etc and have primarily moved to Gmail but it’s such a hassle to change all the addresses.
My inbox has seen an increase in spam in 2023 but I always use the report functions for phishing, and Spam. It works until the spammers work around it and I’ll report it again.
For stuff it completely misses, I always create rules that put messages either in “Junk mail” or Trash depending on what it is. I’ve been managing my stuff pretty well.
This all assumes you are willing and able to put in a few minutes periodically to adjust filters and report stuff.
I do the same thing. So far it does the trick. People just don’t want to adjust rules and settings these days.
Or may not even know how. Took me a little bit my first time around but now its a breeze.
TIL that Hotmail is still a thing.
Hotmail still exists but is being served by the same platform as outlook.com. it’s just an old name / new name scenario.
I use both Hotmail and outlook. One I give to business and one I give to friends. No business ever gets my outlook.com address and I basically never see a spam email on it. Even my hotmail rarely gets junkmail if you manage what lists your are on.
Many people use their old Hotmail account as a Burner spam dumping spot for businesses and websites they don’t want to give their current email address.
That makes it hard for them to implement a spam filter, when so many people are intentionally sending spam to that old account and never checking it.
Its not only spam. Also scam and getting attacked by bots to get access. I don’t really use the email anymore but got some old accounts made with it… had to put up the 2 step verification to keep it safe. For now
Honestly, 2FA is always a smart idea especially on email since it’s the keystone to everything on the internet, really. But as for attack bots, it’s not just Microsoft, Google’s accounts are constantly being bombarded too, it’s ridiculous
But that’s how Aron Ralston’s mother found him, he told no one he was going 6 hours away for an 8 hour day hike on April 26, 2003. She was in Englewood Colorado May 1st answering the security questions to his email account, used his email to reset his bank account password, and found out his last purchase was at a grocery store in Moab Utah. She sent search & rescue to that location where they found his red Toyota truck was found 2 hour drive away near Blue-John Canyon National Park, sent up a rescue helicopter and he was lucky to be seen after amputating his arm to get out of the crevice 5 days after he was pinned under that 800lb boulder. Even a helicopter with a FLIR thermal camera likely would have never found him in that narrow crevice under a boulder.
I gave up on Hotmail in the 1990s because of the amount of spam it was afflicted with then.
I have had my Hotmail account for 23 years. You are just now figuring it out. Lol. J/K. Once enough people report it as spam it will head to the right place. My biggest complaint is I can’t block top level domains. Please let me block certain top level domains that generate almost all of the spam.
Gotta pay for Microsoft365 business account with a custom domain then.
That’s probably the problem… not enough people use Hotmail anymore. You still got an AOL email address too?
Hotmail has spam filtering. It’s severely bad and blocks random stuff that’s legit. Real garbage spam however is taken like it’s gold.
its hilarious how mails from legit websites get blocked, yet a lot of those “you won the lottery”, “you have got an inheritance” or “your paypal/amazon/itunes account has been blocked” pass with no issue.
Has this sudden flare-up of spam happened to anyone else in the last year?
> Yes, x@hotmail.fr here, this last 6 monh I received a lot of more spam.
But I think this is a factor of two things.
One, my mailbox is old, 14 year, and used in a lot of service, live and dead. So my mail is probably in a lot of spam list.Two, there is no virus etc, that’s just plain text spam and never the same address. spam are now so close to legit mail that the standard filter cannot work great anymore.
Maybe AI will save us from spam mail.
PS : I use outlook client and not webmail.
Yes it is. I ducking hate it. Think this will be the final nail to make me move on.