Delivery failed - backscatter PLEASE HELP

Question

Anyone who emails me receives a delivery failed message from a random email address despite it landing in my main inbox. My spam is full of them and it’s always from the same email. It looks like this:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

<removed PII>@gmail.com A problem occurred during the delivery of this message. Please try to resend the message later.

It’s been impossible to contact Microsoft. I can’t seem to talk to an agent or get a contact number to speak to a real human. How can I fix this issue to stop it from happening please?

Answer 1

Hello,

Make sure you do this on a computer, not on smartphone or tablet. Go to https://www.outlook.com and log in, click on the gear icon on the top right to launch the settings.

Then, on the Mail tab, go to Rules. Are there any rules set up here? If yes, delete them all.

Then check the conditional format, again, if it's there, delete it.

Then, check Forwarding and IMAP, If any items are present, delete them as well.

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If you can't find anything, go to https://account.live.com > Your info > Sign in Preferences. Make sure to check all the aliases here. If you don't recognize any there, delete it.

Then go to Security > Manage How I sign in, make sure all contact info is yours. Then scroll down on the same page, look under App Password, click on remove existing app passwords as well.

Please make sure you change your password and enable two-step verficiation.

Go to your account online, go to Devices, remove any devices you don't recognize.

Then go to Security, click on Sign out everywhere. This is meant to kill any session that's still connected. Unfortunately, this one will take 24 hours to take effect.