Toni Dimaano Tech 02.21.2023 01:Feb AM EST

Microsoft Outlook Spam Email Filter Breaks, Users Flooded With Dangerous Spam Emails

For many users, Microsoft Outlook's spam filters appear to be failing right now, allowing an influx of unsolicited emails to reach users.

According to The Verge, the bulk of these messages that reach Outlook users' inboxes are unmistakably spam.

Users Were Quick To Notice The Problem

Several Outlook users who have reported the incident on social media sites and the Microsoft Community website have confirmed that this problem is still active.

They claimed that all messages were landing in their inboxes, including ones that would have typically been marked as spam and routed to the junk folder.

Some claim that selecting the box next to "Only trust email from addresses in my Safe Senders and domains list and Safe mailing lists" in Junk Mail > Filters does not resolve this problem.

Bleeping Computer writes that several users even mentioned a fully faulty filtering system for the webmail service as the root of the problem.

In addition to mentions on Twitter and other channels, the outage tracker Down Detector is displaying a significant amount of complaints of Outlook outages.

Microsoft has not yet revealed what is causing the bug, but it is a persistent problem that has to be fixed as soon as possible.

How many users are impacted by the issue and how pervasive the issue is are both still unknown to Outlook users at the moment.

However, if a user's inbox is now overwhelmed with weird messages they might want to spend some time carefully eliminating anything that looks out of the usual.

Microsoft Stays Mum About The Incident

According to The Express, it is important to note that emails are frequently used by cybercriminals to lure victims into downloading malicious files.

Links that direct users to fake websites where usernames and passwords are stolen and used to hack accounts are occasionally also included.

For the meantime, Microsoft says that to avoid being informed each time a fresh batch of spam arrives, customers who are experiencing this might want to temporarily turn off Outlook mail notifications.

At the moment, the Office service status page indicates that "everything is up and running" despite the constant flood of consumer complaints.

As mentioned before, Microsoft has yet to publicly confirm Outlook customers' claims that spam filters are malfunctioning.

According to Bleeping Computer, Microsoft was also asked for a comment regarding the occurring issue, but has still not provided any comment as well.

Although the Outlook spam filtering problem appears to be particularly severe today and is affecting a large number of users, it has been an issue for months.

In fact, it can be remembered that since at least November 2021, several users have claimed to have a large number of spam emails arrive in their inbox.

It is important to note that only last month, a worldwide outage also affected several Microsoft Outlook users, but unlike the current one, that was immediately addressed.