Microsoft's Outlook Spam Email Filters Are Broken for Many Right Now (theverge.com) 39
New submitter calicuse writes: Microsoft's Outlook spam filters appear to be broken for many users today. I woke up to more than 20 junk messages in my Focused Inbox in Outlook this morning, and spam emails have kept breaking through on an hourly basis today. Many Outlook users in Europe have also spotted the same thing, with some heading to Twitter to complain about waking up to an inbox full of spam messages. Most of the messages that are making it into Outlook users' inboxes are very clearly spam. Today's issues are particularly bad, after weeks of the Outlook spam filter progressively deteriorating for me personally.
botted already (Score:1)
outlook.com/hotmail.com was aggressively spamming with spam bots for at least two weeks already.
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I've been seeing more false negatives in Gmail compared to my Outlook account.
Should I repeat the solution approach again? About following the money and cutting it off? Naw, just the top level PoC. (Should I dare you to express interest, though I won't be back for some hours...) So:
Which prominent kind of spam has disappeared? Pump-and-dump stock-scam spam. Funny how most people don't notice what isn't there, but after some researchers proved that the scam was a money tree, they changed the rules to take aw
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Was the Outlook spam filter ever working?
Only experience I have had from it have been a lot of false flaggings.
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Well, maybe I don't use it enough? But my basic experience there is that there aren't many false negatives, though there was a period when it had a bunch of false positives.
Spam is a good thing and we should all want it. (Score:1)
Spam informs consumers of available products. As consumers are informed approximately 25,000 times a day they become super charged and make rational, absolutely perfect buying decisions at all times.
This pleases the invisible hand and prices drop, technological innovations come at an accelerated pace, and consumers collectively enjoy sacramental invisible handjobs and enter a state of extended consumer bliss.
Your inbox is a small price to pay once you’ve tasted such ecstasy.
Speaking of ecstacy, I
So! (Score:2)
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Meaning you're the odd one out in a very big world of mostly Microsoft users. If you want a personalised news service to suit only you then you're going to need to start your own.
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Same here. Running my own email servers, no SPAM problems.
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You need static IP addresses on your servers or some reputation-based blacklists will be problematic.
Opposite Problem (Score:2)
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I have always had issues with some emails. Microsoft puts them into the spam folder and I drag them out. It asks me if i never want emails from that sender to be marked as spam and I click "yes". The next day, the same email is in the spam folder.
If only that were the only breakage. (Score:3)
I run logwatch on a Linux VM that produces a large report. The report is emailed out via Office365.
If I try to send that report directly to my work email address, which is hosted by Microsoft, it is not delivered. The last relay that I control shows it as successfully delivered to Microsoft.
If I send it to my personal email address, it is delivered to BOTH my personal address and my work address.
Extremely ambiguous headline here.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which technology is this article about? Outlook itself is Not a spam filtering service and has little to do with spam filtering at all, but Outlook does refer to so many different things they may as well have written - "Internet connections are performing poorly for many people around the world right now"
Microsoft Outlook the email client software program used with any kind of Microsoft Exchange system, including EOL? Afaik that program doesn't really filter spam.
or the Microsoft 365 Exchange Online service (Office365) that can be accessed using Outlook program?
Or one of the other services that uses Outlook.. which service? It's extremely vague to say "Outlook spam filters are broken.
Outlook doesn't really do spam filtering... Mail servers do. Outlook sits there to let people set the server side rules, and the Outlook clients act upon Spam Confidence level reported by servers to move items to the Junk mail. On the other hand... the Client itself has more a role in IMAP-based services
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This is the same sort of fuzziness as "the internet is broken, it must be the server".
IOW, the expected expressive acuity of people who use microsoft for their "email".
And not unexpected from these "editors" to copy that sort of waffle verbatim.
Re:Extremely ambiguous headline here.. (Score:5, Informative)
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What is broken is Exchange Online Protection,
Well that would be good to know - It would affect anyone using Only EOP then, but it won't affect Outlook users running On-Premise Exchange who chose a different service other than EOP, and it won't affect Exchange Online Outlook users who use Proofpoint or other solutions that aren't EOP.
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I assume they are referring to Microsoft hosted email such as outlook.live.com, hotmail, etc. I use one of these and have notice a marked increase in spam in the past few days, not only showing up in the inbox instead of junk, but a higher total count of spam items. Most of it is fake advertisements.
Incidentally, I created my Microsoft hosted account long ago as a spam account to use when signing up for things, but after a while discovered that my ISP account had more spam and worse filtering, so I shifte
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There's a crappy junk mail filter in Outlook, but it's rarely active these days.
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There's a crappy junk mail filter in Outlook, but it's rarely active these days.
I mean.. Whatever it is that Outlook has if you don't have that program connected to an Exchange server with the Server setting the Spam Confidence level and applying the spam filtering - Has never done much; basically, Nobody would notice if whatever Junk Mail folder mechanism there is built into Outlook itself was suddenly inoperative.
I held a bake-off on spam filters recently (Score:2)
I held a bake-off on spam filters in Outlook.com (MS Office 365), GMail, various SpamAssassin email systems, and Yahoo! Business.
My email address is 25 years old and gets hundreds of pieces of spam emails every day. To be fair, all the email providers dumped them in the Junk folder. However, only GMail (Google Workspace) filtered nearly everything. I only get one or two spam emails in my Spam folder. I don't know if it's advanced greylisting or fancy AI, but it's pretty amazing.
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only GMail (Google Workspace) filtered nearly everything. I only get one or two spam emails in my Spam folder. I don't know if it's advanced greylisting or fancy AI, but it's pretty amazing.
It's collaborative. They collate spam reports from multiple users and use them to identify spam across multiple accounts. I have the same experience, gmail is head and shoulders above everyone else.
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And they are so confident in their system that they don't even put the spam emails in the Spam folder. It's really that good.
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And they are so confident in their system that they don't even put the spam emails in the Spam folder. It's really that good.
I have 5,888 spams in my gmail spam folder, which has 30 days of retention. At worst, 5 or 6 spams hit my inbox a day. That is a marvelous success rate. I also have very few false positives, maybe three or four a month maximum* based on experience.
* Could be more if I got more mail from known spammers, I guess.
No different than normal (Score:3)
Only MS? (Score:2)
I've had at least five spams per day in my gmail for the last week as well. That's up from zero.
public email services overrun (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like a lot of email services are overrun with spammers, Outlook, Gmail, SendGrid, Mailchimp, others. We get the same types of junk email all day every day, each time from a fresh account and slightly different wording. Spam filters and anti-spoofing work well enough that a spammer's best option is to abuse Outlook or Gmail because almost no one can effectively block Outlook or Gmail and still do business. Between the abuse of free/cheap accounts and account take-overs, these platforms are as much junk as not.
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because almost no one can effectively block Outlook or Gmail and still do business
You can put Gmail on a "Preapproved-senders Only" basis.
I used SurgeMail for this in the past. It can monitor your SMTP Authenticated sessions and automatically add addresses you've sent email in the past to your "Friends" list. But you could also do this on an Organization-wide basis, where any Gmail.com users e-mailing someone in your company Will only have their message accepted If they are a known customer or someo
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Spam filters and anti-spoofing work well enough that a spammer's best option is to abuse Outlook or Gmail because almost no one can effectively block Outlook or Gmail and still do business.
You can say that again. I'd love to be able to block Microsoft's and Google's entire ASNs owing to the volume of spam I receive that comes from there, and the near-total lack of effectiveness gained by notifying them.
Par for the course (Score:2)
M$ is one of the worst spam networks on the planet, see for yourself.
https://www.spamhaus.org/stati... [spamhaus.org]
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Informative)
M$ is one of the worst spam networks on the planet, see for yourself.
https://www.spamhaus.org/stati... [spamhaus.org]
Meanwhile, on the receive side, they block legitimate sites that have never sent spam with no recourse.
Exchange Online Spam Filter Sucks (Score:1)
We ran internal exchange with SpamHero as our external filter proxy.
SpamHero wasn’t as good as Gmail, but pretty good.
But we joined the O365 bandwagon, and Exchange Online spam filtering just sucks.
Way too many good messages caught in spam. Malicious spam getting through. I’m thinking about sticking a spam proxy in from of Exchange online.
Any recommendations?
Think I've identified the core issue (Score:2)
You're willingly using Outlook.
Hotmail is definitely affected (Score:2)
Yahoo (Score:2)
Yahoo's spam filters are broken as shit too. They don't event filter out the most obvious of spam