Buggish: Microsoft Email Spam (Junk) Filtering

I have a gmail and hotmail account that has made it into the global spamming list of emails.

I barely receive any junk mail in the gmail account. I almost most definitely don't get any of the same or similar emails after I mark it as junk.

In my hotmail account, I get 10-20 junk mails a day of spam. I do not understand why this filtering is so hard for Microsoft to track as most of the junk look almost identical, and if not identical the same format. Of the easiest junk mail to track are the ones with subjects that start with an icon image. I get emails that are not even addressed to me. I get emails that is addressed to a single person in the body but sent to a group of people. They all have images that link to a domain that is not in the from address.

At the very least, I do not see emails with massively misspelled words.

Sure none may necessarily mean it is junk mail, but majority have multiple red flags. I don't even think you need AI to filter most junk mail. But now with AI and big data, this should be even easier for a company like Microsoft to figure most this out.

Life: Checking Outlook Recent Activity

I received an email for verification from Microsoft and was not sure what it was for. So I went onto my outlook accounts to check which one had the email address that received the verification request.

While I was at it, I checked the recent activity page. I noticed on one of my accounts a bunch of sign-in from Netherlands. I panicked a little, so I changed my password. I then checked one of my google accounts that automatically downloaded the emails and did find that the schedule matched up.

One odd part of this was that in the morning, the IP was from the US. The IP from last night was from Netherlands.

Google (US) - 209.85.214.140
Google (Netherland) - 209.85.219.14

Email

It would be nice if the email contained what address it was trying to verify.

Microsoft account

Verify your email address

To finish setting up this Microsoft account, we just need to make sure this email address is yours.

Steps to check activity

1. Sign into outlook.com
2. Click on your user icon
3. Account Settings
4. Recent activity
5. Answer security question