Update - Broken Email Filters Flood Microsoft Outlook With Spam
An increasing number of Microsoft customers are reporting their inboxes have been flooded with spam emails since the weekend, thanks to broken email spam filters. The ongoing issue is confirmed by the volume of Outlook users taking to social media platforms and the Microsoft Community website to report messages that were landing in their inboxes, even ones that would have been previously tagged as spam and sent to the junk folder.
Some users have reported that even checking the "Only trust email from addresses in my Safe Senders and domains list and Safe mailing lists" in Junk Mail > Filters hasn’t fixed the problem, supporting the belief that the webm
ail service's filtering is completely broken.
Another user said, “It's definitely deliberate. Microsoft doesn't care one bit. 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.”
Microsoft has yet to share a public statement confirming Outlook that spam filters are broken and despite the abundance of customer complaints, the Office service status page states that "everything is up and running." Once opening the ‘show more’ link, however, the following is detailed:
Title: Some users may see spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes
User impact: Users may have seen spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes.
More info: Affected users may have seen performance issues such as navigation delays and messaging latency in Outlook.com or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) connections.
The spam filtering issue in Outlook is not new and has been going on for months, with some claiming to receive many spam emails landing in their inbox since this past November.
One user tweeted, “Did Outlook wake up today and decide "today's the day we turn off the spam filters" with the attached image shown on the left.
Spam Is Not Just Annoying - It Can Be A Serious Security Threat!
While mostly just annoying, spam can be a security threat that must be addressed with a defense-in-depth approach as no piece of antivirus software or spam filter alone is sufficient in detecting today’s advanced attacks.
Protecting against modern threats is a task that demands multiple layers of AI- and OSINT-powered security features designed to work harmoniously both with each other and with EOP’s existing protection to safeguard businesses’ users and critical data in Microsoft 365.