Increase in junk mail on Hotmail?

[SimonTheSailor]

Over the last few days I have had a significant increase in junk mail to my Hotmail account. Now normal junk gets filtered and I hardly ever see it, but there's a whole load of new stuff that comes straight into my 'Focused' folder. I keep reporting/deleting it but wondered if anybody else has seen this increase ?

Not too sure how they are doing it, think they are hiding the sender's name somehow ?

[GlenMH]

No - not seeing any change in spam levels in any of my hotmail accounts. Very very little is getting through to my inbox.

[The Road Crew]

Yeah mine is now terrible. Inbox spam was practically nil previously, now it' almost constant!

[Sunday Drive]

I have over 19,000 spam messages in my hotmail inbox. It has always been terrible, but I’ve had the address for around 30 years now.

Gmail is the way forward for minimal spam.

You’re doing well to not get much on hotmail….

[33q]

I'm getting more spam too at the moment. I suspect it is connected to me signing up to a couple of new forums.

[mike9009]

Yeah, I have a hot mail account and seem to be getting a lot more. Most around missing deliveries.

But my work account also seems to be getting much more too. But that is generally crap from companies rather than scams....

[Sheepshanks]

33q said:

I'm getting more spam too at the moment. I suspect it is connected to me signing up to a couple of new forums.

I use a separate Hotmail email address for forum sign ups and never look at it once the sign up is verified. Only down side is I don’t see PMs unless a poster prompts me to look.

I monitor late FIL’s BT email address and he used to get a ton of spam but it fairly quickly fell away to nothing, so I wonder if the senders are able to check if an email address is active? That said, I’d noticed the account is getting spam again, but only a couple of emails per day.

[outnumbered]

Updating email filtering systems to combat spam is an ongoing battle. There’s probably some new spam campaign that is not handled well by whatever technology Microsoft are using, and they need to modify some rules or code to handle it.

[CanAm]

Nearly all of them have “[e-mail]” as their “real” email address and seem to have found a way of overcoming the Outlook Rules, such as sending mail including specific keywords direct to Trash. Bloody annoying as there will be one in 100 which is a genuine email.

[Brother D]

I don't understand how this could happen? I thought companies couldn't send us junk mail due to GPDR laws and having a click box on every single website?

[CanAm]

Mine are all from the USA. Most likely because there are at least 6 idiots over there that I know of with email addresses very close to mine, but with numbers added - which they usually omit.

[Sheepshanks]

Brother D said:

I don't understand how this could happen? I thought companies couldn't send us junk mail due to GPDR laws and having a click box on every single website?

They can send email if it's in their legitimate interest to send it - but must give you the option to opt out.

However most junk email isn't from legitimate companies.

[sideways sid]

I've noticed more ads and junk coming through too.

I'm sure its just a coincidence, but I'm aso seeing more invitations from MS to subscribe to 'ad-free' hotmail!

[bazza white]

I deleted mine a few weeks back. First account i ever had at 16 back in the msn days. It filled with crap several years ago and I spent ages going through it all. It didn't take long to fill up again so just deleted my account and waited the notice period.


Felt a bit strange and sad deleting it, felt like end of an era.

[popegregory]

Glad to read this, it’s not just me then. Is it just a question of waiting for Microsoft to catch up?

[Richard-390a0]

Just adverts rather than spam is the only thing getting through to my inbox.

[NDA]

I've had Yahoo since the beginning. I get roughly 30 spam mails a day - mostly bitcoin and McCafey (?) virus protection. Neither of which I have anything to do with. I delete the lot every day.

Whilst it's not hugely bothersome, I do wish there was a way to automatically send them to the bin.

[C n C]

I've also seen an increase over the last couple of weeks with hotmail. It has previously been pretty good at putting stuff in the junk mail folder, but an increasing amount now ends up in the inbox - often to do with "missed deliveries" and commonly the title is in unusual fonts.

[vikingaero]

I've gone from an average of ~20 junk emails to 80+ each day on Hotmail. And there are a few of them that get through in the early evening and ping your email notifications.

If you whois some of the website address that the spam seeks to resolve to, you can also see that most of it is hosted by Amazon Web Services.

[robsa]

Me too, mainly US adverts. I don't want to junk my hotmail address though as I've had it for decades.

Anyone know what's going on? It just suddenly started happening six months ago or so. Before that, it was always detected and junked.