Why is my spam filter not working? How to stop receiving spam on Hotmail and Outlook when users report problems

Outlook and Hotmail users are reporting problems with their email spam filter when unwanted email ends up in their regular mailboxes.

People started logging the issue with the Down Detector troubleshooter, complaining on social media on Monday morning.

Sports broadcaster Georgie Bingham tweeted: “Has anyone else used their Hotmail to send spam to their inbox with the filter set to the highest privacy level? Very strange.” She received dozens of responses from people with the same problem.

Another Hotmail user, Niall Deacon, commented, “Did someone at Hotmail accidentally turn off the spam filter?”

Sean Carey added: “Did anyone get spam in their Outlook inbox today? Spam filter failure or something?

Microsoft, which works with both Outlook and Hotmail, responded to some users via its Microsoft Support Twitter account, telling them, “Hi! I’m glad you got in touch. We see that you are receiving spam in your Outlook inbox. We’re here to help, and we invite you to DM us about using characters along the way, and let’s discuss the matter in more detail there.

I contacted Microsoft for more comments.

How to properly set up a spam filter?

Emails identified as potentially spam may be automatically moved to the Junk Email folder.

If you receive spam email, you can block email addresses and domains from which you do not want to receive messages.

To put it in hot mailchoose institutions and then go Show all Outlook settings. Then go mail > spamEnter the email address you want to block Blocked Senders and choose Add to. If you want to block all email from a domain, enter the domain name below Blocked domains and choose Add to. Make sure you hit Save when you’re done

IN perspectives You can make the spam filter more aggressive so that it catches more spam messages. However, the higher the security level, the higher the risk that some legitimate messages will be identified as spam and sent to the Junk Email folder.

To select a spam filter level, click At home > Delete Group > Spam > Spam Optionsand then select the desired filter.

Default, gmail scans all email messages for spam. When Gmail detects spam, the message is delivered to the spam folder. You can’t turn off spam scanning in Gmail. However, you can use spam Option to create spam filters to configure spam scanning behavior in Gmail. Read more here.