how do I stop obscene emails in Outlook.com? Didn't ask for these. Microsoft said they fixed it. Didn't.
Log into my Outlook email account on a desktop and a laptop, and in the Junk mailbox on either one are all sorts of obscene emails, most with numbers instead of letters for email addresses, and most from foreign countries. How can I stop these from coming to me? I block them or mark them as phishing scams, but every day they're back. Blocking on Outlook apparently doesn't work.
I asked Microsoft Support for help, but it didn't do any good.
All Replies (8)
Some e-mail providers have an option to sort incoming mail. Check with your provider.
Go here and register for protection for your e-mail and phones; The National Do Not Call Registry
Unfortunately, spammers are good at spamming, and mailbox providers don't always have a good incentive for continuously improving their filters. Microsoft might be better than some because Outlook.com is on the same platform as business users. Of course, they might have some paid filtering features not available to free accounts...
Unless someone has created an add-on to pre-filter your mailbox for you, I think you're stuck doing it by hand.
Outlook.com has a new-ish feature called Clutter that puts mail which looks like bulk mail into a separate folder. It's not necessarily junk, it's just stuff thought to be lower priority. I don't know whether that would be helpful, but it's a somewhat trainable filter. You could experiment with it here:
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try that, and hope that I don't end up with one more bunch of emails to sort besides the regular and the junk mail.
If you are using Microsoft Live Mail, there are filter settings you can use to send everything to the junk folder except mail you choose.
Thanks, but I have way too much in the junk folder now--it's full of obscene emails. That's what I'm trying to stop from ever coming to me at all. I have to delete all that every day.
This just recently started happening to me, too, and I have no idea where this came from. Obviously, someone found or sold my email address.
Either way, this is not related to Firefox, and it's something you'd have to take up with Microsoft.
Webmail providers have no control over what is coming in. Some e-mail providers have the option to sort incoming mail. Contact your e-mail provider for help.
Hi JMTR, software sometimes is good at recognizing patterns. If you need an add-on to go into your Junk folder and identify bad messages and delete them for you, there may be a way to do that. The main risk is that something you actually wanted to read would get cleared because the filter was not sophisticated enough (example: search engine "safe search" features blocking people from researching breast cancer).
I don't know whether anyone has ever made such an add-on, but it might be quite popular if they did.