outlook spam, getting much worse

Question

Just to give you an update, I used to receive about 10 spam emails per day from Outlook, but during the past few weeks, that number has increased to about 25. Gmail is receiving none. They all begin in the same manner; therefore, I'm sure Microsoft has to figure out a way to disable these kinds of meaningless emails.

Email example

[Mod removed PII]@tu1r14j8gcxf3ok.com

Answer 1

Hi NICK ADSL UK,

I understand that you’ve noticed a noticeable increase in spam messages reaching your Outlook mailbox over the past few weeks, especially compared to Gmail, and that these messages appear repetitive and follow a similar pattern, which makes the situation increasingly frustrating.

A few points may help clarify what’s happening:

• Spam volumes can fluctuate over time as senders continuously adjust their tactics to bypass filters. A pattern that appears repetitive to users may still vary enough at a technical level (sender domains, IPs, message structure) to temporarily pass automated filtering.
• Different email providers use different spam‑detection models and thresholds, so it’s not uncommon for a message blocked by Gmail to still reach Outlook, or vice versa.
• Outlook.com’s spam filtering is adaptive. User actions such as marking messages as Junk or reporting them as phishing directly contribute to improving future filtering for similar messages.

From the forum’s perspective, contributors don’t have access to backend spam filters or the ability to disable a specific spam campaign. What can be done on the user side is to continue reporting these messages as Junk or Phishing and ensure no safe‑sender rules or inbox rules are unintentionally allowing them through.

If you’d like, you can also submit feedback from Help > Feedback in Outlook.com to share your experience with increased spam volume, which helps highlight broader filtering trends.

While spam filtering aims to reduce unwanted mail, no provider is able to block all spam at all times, especially as sending patterns continue to evolve.

I hope this helps explain why you’re seeing this change and how Outlook’s filtering adapts over time.