How do I stop sexually explicit emails when filters and rules don't seem to work?

Good day!

Welcome to Microsoft Community. Thank you for sharing your concern with us today and we hope that all is well. Dealing with unwanted sexually explicit email especially when you've already set up filters, rules, and blocked sender can be extremely frustrating. While there isn’t a magic switch that stops all such emails, here are several steps and strategies you can try to further reduce or eliminate them:

• Enhanced Junk Email Protection: In Outlook (or Outlook.com), go to your Settings and navigate to Junk email options. Make sure you’ve selected the highest level of filtering available. Although this may sometimes send a few legitimate messages to Junk, it can help catch more spam.
• Block Domains and Keywords: Even if you’ve blocked specific email addresses, spammers often rotate through different ones. Instead of only blocking specific senders, add entire domains (if you notice a pattern) to your blocked list. Additionally, consider incorporating keywords that often appear in these messages into your filtering rules:
  • Create rules that check the subject line or email body for common explicit terms or phrases and move those messages directly to Deleted Items.
• Report as Junk or Phishing: Every time you receive one of these emails, use Outlook’s “Report Junk” or “Report Phishing” feature. This helps train Microsoft’s filtering algorithms and may contribute to future improvements in filtering similar emails on your account.
• Consistent Reporting: Consistently marking these as spam or explicit can slowly change the behavior of the machine learning system on Microsoft’s servers. (It might take some time to see a difference, however.)

Hope this helps!

Fritz-Bald

Microsoft Community

Moderator

Hi Frtiz,

I apologize for failing to respond to your answer to my question. I didn't answer because I've tried everything you suggested to no avail. I'm aware these spammers, scammers, and phishers use different URLs. But, I set up a rule to block pictures on emails (in attempt to reduce the number of naked bodies I have to look at), only to have the filters block photos from trusted senders but NOT these soft pornographic and hard pornographic emails.

Based on your suggestions, it appears it is impossible to permanently rid my inbox of this trash. So, I continue to report as junk and block or report as sexually inappropriate and block.

If you have any other suggestions, I am open to hearing them. Thank you jlg

Good day!

Thank you for the update.

Spam emails especially those with explicit content can be incredibly persistent and frustrating, particularly when spammers use cunning methods like rotating URLs, multiple sender addresses, and domain variations to bypass standard filters. While no method guarantees 100% elimination spammers are continually evolving their techniques.

Thank you for understanding.

Regards,

Fritz-Bald

Microsoft Community

Moderator

Good day!

Welcome to Microsoft Community. Thank you for sharing your concern with us today and we hope that all is well. Dealing with unwanted sexually explicit email especially when you've already set up filters, rules, and blocked sender can be extremely frustrating. While there isn’t a magic switch that stops all such emails, here are several steps and strategies you can try to further reduce or eliminate them:

• Enhanced Junk Email Protection: In Outlook (or Outlook.com), go to your Settings and navigate to Junk email options. Make sure you’ve selected the highest level of filtering available. Although this may sometimes send a few legitimate messages to Junk, it can help catch more spam.
• Block Domains and Keywords: Even if you’ve blocked specific email addresses, spammers often rotate through different ones. Instead of only blocking specific senders, add entire domains (if you notice a pattern) to your blocked list. Additionally, consider incorporating keywords that often appear in these messages into your filtering rules:
  • Create rules that check the subject line or email body for common explicit terms or phrases and move those messages directly to Deleted Items.
• Report as Junk or Phishing: Every time you receive one of these emails, use Outlook’s “Report Junk” or “Report Phishing” feature. This helps train Microsoft’s filtering algorithms and may contribute to future improvements in filtering similar emails on your account.
• Consistent Reporting: Consistently marking these as spam or explicit can slowly change the behavior of the machine learning system on Microsoft’s servers. (It might take some time to see a difference, however.)

Hope this helps!

Fritz-Bald

Microsoft Community

Moderator