Microsoft Outlook users report flood of spam emails

Problem has been rumbling on for months

Many Microsoft Outlook users on Monday reported an influx of spam in their email inboxes, even though their privacy settings were configured to the highest level.

Some users speculated the issue was likely a result of broken email filters.

"I've received 36 spam emails in my inbox the past 2 hours straight. It's been happening for way too long and it just continues to get worse on an hourly basis," one user said, on Reddit.

Another added, "Seems to have begun happening between 10pm and midnight Eastern time (I have a successful junk mail at 10:04pm, and the first inbox junk mail at 12:17am)."

Georgie Bingham, a sports broadcaster, tweeted: "Anyone else's hotmail throwing junk mail into their inbox even though the filter is set to the highest privacy setting? Very odd."

Although numerous users expressed their dissatisfaction over the issue, the Office service status page showed that "everything is up and running."

Microsoft earlier said there were no problems with the Outlook junk filter. Nevertheless, the company requested some users to contact the company via direct message to explore the matter further.

Apart from regular spam filtering, Outlook has a feature called "Focused Inbox" that is designed to identify important emails, such as those from familiar contacts. The feature moves important emails to a separate Focused tab, while other new emails are placed in the Other tab. A significant number of users reported that neither the standard spam-tracking nor the Focused Inbox feature is functioning properly.

Although the latest Outlook spam issue appears to be impacting a large number of customers now, it has reportedly been a persistent problem for several months. Since at least November 2021, many users have reported receiving spam emails in their inbox.

This is the second time in 2023 that Outlook has experienced a disruption. A major outage last month affected several Microsoft services.

During that incident, users reported difficulties with sending, receiving, or searching emails on Outlook.

Xbox Live, Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were among the other services that experienced issues.

Many users on Microsoft Teams were unable to send and receive messages, join calls or utilise other features of the Team app, forcing office employees to revert to in-person meetings or connect through other alternative platforms.

Microsoft later said it implemented targeted mitigation to the infrastructure and the issue was eventually resolved.