Concern About Unknown Email Address Appearing in Suggested Contacts

Good day!

Welcome to Microsoft Community. Thank you for sharing your concern with us today and we hope that all is well. I understand your concern. In Outlook, the "Suggested Contacts" feature may suggest email addresses based on various factors, including emails you've received, sent, or interacted with in the past. It's possible that the email address appeared in the suggested contacts list due to an email being received, even if you didn't open it.

To prevent unwanted email addresses from appearing in the suggested contacts list, you can try the following steps:

1. Manually remove the email address from the suggested contacts list.
2. Mark any suspicious emails as junk or spam.
3. Regularly review and clean up your contacts list.

Regards,

Fritz-Bald

Microsoft Community

Moderator

Hi There,

I am not really satisfied with that response to the original question for the following reasons, as I am having a similar issue. Up until now, I have NEVER seen any "Suggested Contacts" come up in the To/Cc/Bcc that I have not previously sent an email to in the past. If I have received an email from someone (spam, marketing, receipts, password reset logins, work, personal ect.) and have not replied to it, it does not come up in the suggested contacts section when I start to type in an email address.

The only way a contact has ever come up in the suggested contacts is if I have sent that person an email in the past. So why are there 3 new completely random ones that come up for me?

I know there has been a massive data breach reported in the news, with anything from 184 million to 16 billion passwords and credentials leaked, so please understand why some people are spooked.

The 3 email addresses that come up for me are as follows at the end. Have I been hacked and someone has forwarded a bunch of my emails to these addresses? I can see I don't have anything in my Sent folder but I also know its easy to delete an email from the Sent folder, and then delete it again from the recovery so I cannot really be sure. I have 2FA set up but I also know that it itself is not foolproof and I have had a period where I have 20-40 failed log in attempts per day on my login (as viewable in "view my sign-in activity" on the security tab in Microsoft profile) which has all of a sudden stopped.

If you can please investigate it further that would be great, I understand you will probably have a general PR approved response if there is a breach but please do not try to say that " In Outlook, the "Suggested Contacts" feature may suggest email addresses based on various factors, including emails you've received, sent, or interacted with in the past. It's possible that the email address appeared in the suggested contacts list due to an email being received, even if you didn't open it."

EDIT - Others found are as listed

phishing40bb5da11 AT outlook DOT com

I have the same thing, and it's making my Google pixel also bring that email address up as an option to email to when I long press on the outlook for Android app, as well as making it pull that address as a recommendation when sharing in Google photos. The email address is literally "phishing" followed by a bunch of random numbers and letters at outlook.com

...not suspicious at all .... I see zero way to remove that email address from my suggested contacts when using the outlook for Android app. Zero way to block that address altogether too at this point since I must have deleted the spam email it originally was a part of. So frustrating. The recommendations made here by microsoft don't apply to the outlook for Android app. The app doesn't have any way to remove that address as a suggestion, as they tell you to do, nor to stop making suggestions in the first place.

I have the same 1b8d... etc. address. Any news on this?

Good day!

Welcome to Microsoft Community. Thank you for sharing your concern with us today and we hope that all is well. I understand your concern. In Outlook, the "Suggested Contacts" feature may suggest email addresses based on various factors, including emails you've received, sent, or interacted with in the past. It's possible that the email address appeared in the suggested contacts list due to an email being received, even if you didn't open it.

To prevent unwanted email addresses from appearing in the suggested contacts list, you can try the following steps:

1. Manually remove the email address from the suggested contacts list.
2. Mark any suspicious emails as junk or spam.
3. Regularly review and clean up your contacts list.

Regards,

Fritz-Bald

Microsoft Community

Moderator

Thank you for your answer! This is a screenshot of the suggested contact I mentioned. The email address consists of random characters.