An important email I was expecting was sent to junk in Outlook, I did email searches and it didn't show up, unless I searched within junk.

Question

This seems like a change in behavior. If I'm expecting an email from someone and their email gets incorrectly sorted into junk, a general email search won't find it! I must repeat the search in the junk folder.

There should be a way to let the user know that something in the junk folder hit their search terms, and ask if they want to see those messages. This is a change in behavior, because I would swear that in the past, if I did a search in email, it would show me any email in any folder (including junk) that hit those search terms. I can understand people wanting to ignore junk, but this is a forced ignore of junk which seems to be the new default behavior, and I don't know if there is a way to change the behavior, other than marking an email address as "not junk," which I would swear I already did.

I received several similar emails from that sender over the years and they weren't sorted into junk (they used MailChimp). I thought that I had an exception to prevent any messages from that domain and/or email address from going into junk from years ago. I would usually only get about 6 emails per year from that email address, which is normal (this has been over the last 5 years).

I don't know how community support can possibly diagnose the cause of this problem (or fix it), because they have no access to my accounts or history. Also, I'm reluctant to post the emails since they contain personal information. So I imagine that this is probably a total waste of my time and everyone else's.

More bugs: this pertains to "New Outlook" not "Classic Outlook," but the child item tag doesn't give me the option of selecting "New Outlook." This is "personal, not business, but the child subitem tag doesn't give me the option of selecting "For personal" only "For business."

Answer 1

Hi @Ken Settle

Thank you for posting question to Microsoft Q&A.

I can certainly understand your frustration on both fronts. It’s stressful enough to miss an important message, and that stress is compounded when the tools you rely on to find it don't work as you'd expect. I’m sorry you had to experience that.

Let's address both points directly.

1. Why Important Emails Sometimes Go to Junk

Outlook's filters work hard to protect you from spam, but they can occasionally be overzealous. The best way to prevent this from happening again with important contacts is to train the filter.

• Mark as "Not Junk": In your Junk Email folder, select the message and choose the "Not Junk" option. This moves it to your Inbox and signals to Outlook that the sender is safe.
• Add to "Safe Senders" List: This is the most effective step. By adding an email address or domain to your Safe Senders list, you tell Outlook to always deliver their emails directly to your Inbox. You can typically do this by right-clicking the message and finding the option under the "Junk" or "Security options" menu.

2. Searching the Junk Folder in Outlook

You are correct in your observation. In both the Classic and New versions of Outlook, the "All Folders" search scope currently does not include the Junk Email folder.

We recognize this can be a significant issue when you need to find an important email that was mistakenly filtered. Therefore, the only reliable method to find a missing item in that folder is to search it separately. The correct procedure is to first click directly on the Junk Email folder and then use the search bar. This ensures your search is performed within that specific folder.

Given this standard behavior, I recommend making it a quick habit to manually scan your Junk Email folder every day or two, just in case something important has been misplaced.

Thank you again for bringing both of these issues to our attention. I hope these explanations and steps are helpful. Please don’t hesitate to reply on the forum if you have any more questions.

Regarding on your personal and business tag question, as there has been an ongoing migration on this platform, some tags might have been missing for now. Please wait for now as the system will add more tags in following days to make sure you could select accurate tag when asking question.

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