Hotmail (Microsoft Outlook) email account getting huge amounts of Junk email

[ssfc72]

This has just started in the last week or so.
I am now getting daily, large numbers of Junk email (100 to 160 emails) in my Hotmail Junk folder.
I have tried to go into the Hotmail settings and have all the Junk email go direct to the Deleted folder but I have not been able to find a way. :-(

Anyone else with a Hotmail/Outlook email account, having this surge in Junk email?

[Jason]

I haven't checked my hotmail/outlook account in a long, long time. But I did just now and it doesn't seem to be getting a lot of junk mail. Maybe a dozen messages since the beginning of the month.

1. Did you post your email address anywhere online?
2. Do you have any forwarding addresses that go to that address?

You can look at the source code in the email to see if the original email was forwarded from a different account and which one if so.

I don't know if there is a way to have junk mail go straight to deleted emails. I think they have it available so you can check for misidentified messages that are actually important to you. They should be deleted automatically after so many days anyway.

Maybe you'll find out in the next few days that a few hundred thousand email addresses were stolen from some database.

[ssfc72]

No, I haven't done anything recently that would have cause my hotmail email address to be added to the spammers list of email addresses.
I had 100 spam emails yesterday, that last time I logged on my hotmail account. I bulk flagged them all as phishing emails, so maybe Microsoft will take the hint and tighten up their blocking of spam emails.

Today I only had 5 spam emails, which is about normal, so hopefully Microsoft has done something to block the excessive spam emails.

Thanks for the help, Jason.

[Jason]

No, I haven't done anything recently that would have cause my hotmail email address to be added to the spammers list of email addresses.

It didn't have to be something you did recently. Sometimes it takes a while for the bots to find the email address if it was posted anywhere. Glad it's back to normal for you. Probably the fault of some server setting that either wasn't filtering the spam or misdirecting it to your email address.

Funny story, my wife gets password verification emails and the odd time even banking information that clearly wasn't meant for her and isn't phishing. We think somebody has an email closer to her address and they're making typos.

[ssfc72]

I had over 100 Junk emails in my Microsoft Hotmail email account, again today.  The massive amount of daily Junk emails seems to be continuing.

[Jason]

That sucks! You might want to enter your email address here and it checks a list of known data breaches to see if your email address (or other information) was stolen.

I've used this website lots of times before; they've been around for a number of years. It's perfectly safe.

[Jason]

I haven't tried it personally but this might help you with blocking all junk mail.

https://www.wikihow.tech/Block-Junk-Mail-on-Hotmail

[Jason]

There was a major breach (over 3 billion emails and passwords) earlier this year. It mentions that there were a lot of Hotmail accounts as well in the breach. It might be that one was yours but is only now being used. Can't really know unless your compare your email address against the breached database using the tool I mentioned. There's another tool in the article specific to that database to check your email against but I don't know anything about it. The website looks pretty legit.

https://cybernews.com/news/largest-compilation-of-emails-and-passwords-leaked-free/