Hotmail/MSN spam

How bad is this for those using these accounts. I have blocked thousands over the years, but still today I average around 50 spam emails daily on my accounts. Gmail very few a month my ISP nothing

I have outlook.com email (formerly hotmail but it's the same account) and it's horrendous. It's got much worse in the last couple of years. Ok so the vast majority goes in the junk mail box, but there must be about 50 new ones a day. And sometimes you need to check junk mail to check if something has gone in there by mistake and it's not a pleasant experience. I've considered switching a few times but it seems a lot of hassle as my email address is registered in zillions of places. I have a gmail account too - not used as much - like you say - no junk mail at all.

They really need to do something about it. My inbox is ok - apart from the occasional phishing email - a couple of which caught me out.

Incidentally I want to know how these criminals work with phishing emails. It's noticeable that if you go on a certain site, you get a phishing email/fake email related to that shortly afterwards. Today for example, I went to log in to the .gov tax website. Shortly after I get a fake email saying I have a tax rebate - looked authentic but I knew it was fake.

I just wish we could bounce email that contains certain words or terms

Yep. One day I went through a load of them and blocked them. Made no difference!

The junk mail filters are pretty useless IMO. I did look up how to reduce it and there were various bits of info about changing settings for junk mail but couldn't even find them. The settings seem to have changed. Surely with all the technology and AI around now, they could block junk mail with certain words in them or strings of letters in the title! The junk mail folder needs a junk filter!

NICK ADSL UK said:

How bad is this for those using these accounts. I have blocked thousands over the years, but still today I average around 50 spam emails daily on my accounts. Gmail very few a month my ISP nothing.

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As with any other site, if you accidentally reveal your email address, there will be the "one" who takes advantage and sells it to the spammers and phishers.

I know, because I made that mistake.
Many folks have inadvertently shown their email when showing their version of Windows 11 thus:



Most will take a screenshot of this, leaving their licensing information intact. As you will note, I have cut mine off.

It's too late now, since I left the info intact and it took only one jerk to copy my email address and sell it!

This is only one way they get your information.

I rarely even use my one(1) Outlook email for anything but Microsoft stuff. I never get spam on it. But I also don't use a commonly spelled word for that email making it harder for the spam bots to guess.

Check your email addresses here and see if it has been involved in any breaches. Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach

Porthos said:

Check your email addresses here and see if it has been involved in any breaches. Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach

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That's where I checked my email accounts. Pretty good but, they sometimes miss a few.

Many folks have inadvertently shown their email when showing their version of Windows 11 thus

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I have told some of the members to hide their accounts when posting those screen shots but, I find it falls
on deaf ears. I still do it in hopes they will be able to edit their posts.

I have four accounts, 1 with hotmail , 1 with Live.com and 2 with Gmail. So far, I can't say that I have had
too many spam callers. If you subscribe to news letters then, you are more likely to get a few more callers.

I do believe that your new iPhones and the like are also prone to these spammers. Mine is from 2008 and
a slider from Nokia (I know...) but, I don't have to worry about geolocation and fake TAX Man calls.

glasskuter said:

I just wish we could bounce email that contains certain words or terms

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Not only that, we need to bounce all spam email addresses and servers. If using Outlook (Office 365), one could have a rule that if one receives an email from a certain address, it could be deleted permanently, but that takes up much time eliminating each spam email. I also use yahoo and gmail and only occasionally get spam, but the spam in my hotmail has increased lately

Wynona said:

As with any other site, if you accidentally reveal your email address, there will be the "one" who takes advantage and sells it to the spammers and phishers.

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You don't even need to reveal your emailadress on some site or forum. Because as the default setting in any email client (the online 'clients' as well) is that any adress you send a email to will be added in the adressbook. When someone's mail has been hacked after that, the hacker has all the adresses in the adressbook to be used and to be sold.

I had that with a Gmailadress, specially made for a (German) forum, where I was helping members finding user manuals. On average 3 times a day I sent such members a mail with the right user manual (when it was not downloadable in the Internet), but I never revealed my special emailadress on the forum or elsewhere in the Internet. Yet, after some years, spam and phishing mails started to come! A few times I got a mail where the sending party reported his PC had been hacked and all the mailadresses from his adressbook were stolen. So I knew why the spam had come without me revealing the mailadress anywhere!

I have a Hotmail address that I use for everything because I get very little spam there. I have no qualms in using it to sign up for things. I do get phishing emails, but just click to report phishing and on I go

A Guy

I had virtually no spam for years, I am quite surprised actually, but if you unsubscribe, 99% spammers have to obey, their providers do not play any games, because they can not afford to be blocked by major players like google. Still I categorize which email to use:

Proton for public
GMX for random
Gmail for eshops
Outlook for legal

And I forward it to filter it further: GMX > Gmail > Outlook

Flashorn said:

I have told some of the members to hide their accounts when posting those screen shots but, I find it falls
on deaf ears. I still do it in hopes they will be able to edit their posts.

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That depends how they use it, I use Proton for general contact, it is even listed on github and zero spam.
I have disabled outlook as alias, so it can not be used to log into my MSA, Proton is not allowed as recovery.

Porthos said:

Check your email addresses here and see if it has been involved in any breaches. Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach

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I already known mine has, from data breaches - checked it before. I still stuck with it. But interested to see there was a recent one:

Twitter (200M): In early 2023, over 200M records scraped from Twitter appeared on a popular hacking forum. The data was obtained sometime in 2021 by abusing an API that enabled email addresses to be resolved to Twitter profiles. The subsequent results were then composed into a corpus of data containing email addresses alongside public Twitter profile information including names, usernames and follower counts.
Compromised data: Email addresses, Names, Social media profiles, Usernames

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All Gmail accounts, Proton forwarding, no spam!

The Twitter hack must mean an awful lot of peoples' email addresses are on pwnd - over 200 million!

My Live Mail account gets a lot of spam, so I started using MailWasher Pro (MWP) a year or so ago. You can set up rules to auto-delete emails containing certain words, spaces, symbols, etc., and it works with multiple email accounts.

DISCLOSURE: MWP is currently experiencing difficulties fetching and filtering Live/Outlook/Hotmail Mail due partially to a change made by MS to the IMAP login procedure. They are actively investigating: Strange thing about: Failed to login to server "imap-mail.outlook.com" - Firetrust Support Forums
So please don't give it a spin if you have those email accounts until they have fixed the issue.

Have a great day.

Regards,
Phil

An update in that I still am receiving on my MSN/Hotmail account around 100 spam/phishing emails a day
I think the whole email system needs a full overhaul, in which only emails from a legal registered ISP can be sent and received. And that could mean the likes of Microsoft and Gmail and others operating an email system could be banned unless they implemented the same standards as ISPs do with regards security

I have made a post in the Microsoft community forum for the attention of the staff, outlying my concerns with this product and ultimately to quit the product if the skills aren't there to make it secure. The bottom line is very simple, if my ISP of 24 years can do it I get around 1 a month then Microsoft with their, so skills should be able to do the same I would have thought. I will let you know what type of feedback I get if it's anything like I normally get like someone's reading from a script then I'm wasting my time, but we shall see

NICK ADSL UK said:

I have made a post in the Microsoft community forum for the attention of the staff, outlying my concerns with this product and ultimately to quit the product if the skills aren't there to make it secure. The bottom line is very simple, if my ISP of 24 years can do it I get around 1 a month then Microsoft with their, so skills should be able to do the same I would have thought. I will let you know what type of feedback I get if it's anything like I normally get like someone's reading from a script then I'm wasting my time, but we shall see

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As expected, they are not responsible for Outlook emails so that was a waste of time asking