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Hotmail Rules and Junk Settings for Blocking and/or Deleting E-Mails from Certain Domains or with Certain Words in the Address NOT WORKING

Hi. I get a ton of spam (probably 100 spam emails to my junk folder each day).  I am confident it will be dramatically cut back if I’m able to block a few domains that cause alot of the problems. But the Hotmail rules and junk mail functions are failing miserably and not working as intended. The email addresses from the spammers are extremely long and constantly changing, but many of them share the same ending. For example, *** Email address is removed for privacy *** and *** Email address is removed for privacy ***. As you can see, the email addresses are quite different, but they both contain the “sharedentco.com” ending. I’ve tried to block the sharedentco.com domain, and I’ve also tried to create rules that delete any email address with sharedentco.com in it. But the emails continue to go to my junk box.  To be clear, my inbox is set to receive exclusively e-mails from my contacts.  From the message boards I have seen thus far, it seems like Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail support/programmers are falling quite short on what should be the implementarion of very simple filters/formulas.  PLEASE HELP!!!  Thank you!
Hi dmb,

>>
Hi. I get a ton of spam (probably 100 spam emails to my junk folder each day). I am confident it will be dramatically cut back if I’m able to block a few domains that cause alot of the problems.
>>

If the messages are going into your Junk Email folder, they are already blocked. Rules only run on messages as they arrive in the inbox, but junk is filtered out first so the rules will never run on the messages in junk email. Sorry. :(

If the messages are not going into Junk, a rule that looks for 'message header includes' should work.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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Thank you, Diane.  Your response was extremely helpful and was the first one to answer my question - as nothing I searched for online answered the question (even when people framed my question the same way I did).  One follow-up question.  I want to play this out by allowing for e-mails to go to my inbox first, even spam, and then I will set rules to delete them immediately.  I have already unchecked "only trust email from addresses in my Safe senders and domains list and Safe mailing lists."  Do I also have to delete the hundreds of "Blocked senders and domains" under the Junk mail settings to make sure that the e-mails first go to my inbox so that my rules take effect and delete those e-mails.  If so, on the web based version of Hotmail/Outlook, it would seem I would need to delete each e-mail address/domain one by one.  Is there a shortcut to get it done quicker?  Thanks again!  

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>> Do I also have to delete the hundreds of "Blocked senders and domains"
Yes, you will need to delete them. Select 1, hold Shift and select the last one - this will select all, so you can delete them at once.

Note that you can't turn off the server side junk filter, so if the mail is identified as spam by the server, it will be moved to the junk folder. You'd need to safe list the addresses, which i don't recommend.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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Thank you!  Very helpful and informative.  Note that the deletion function you mentioned doesn't work for Outlook in the Edge Browser, but I tried it from Chrome and it worked! 

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>>
Note that the deletion function you mentioned doesn't work for Outlook in the Edge Browser, but I tried it from Chrome and it worked!
>>
Interesting. It works here in Edge, but I have all security and cookie settings basically off as i try to figure out why some email links wont work.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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I would like to prevent them from even getting to JUNK. Any ideas?

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Reply In reply to deleted message

Diane said "You'd need to safe list the addresses, which i don't recommend."  I played around today with other avenues but nothing worked.  Crazy that because Outlook knows an address is junk, it has to go to our junk folder for us to manually delete and we cannot auto-delete it based on domain name or email address.  I would be afraid to "safe list" [white list] spam even if that is the only option.  Simple solution is that rules should apply to the junk folder too...  Too bad Outlook doesn't see the wisdom...

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Thanks, I thought Rules would work on Junk, but it didn't, so I guess we have to live with this until Oultook comes up with something. My server sees them as spam and sends it to Junk, very annoying.

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Crazy thing is that it is not your server that sees the e-mails as junk/spam, it is Outlook’s/Hotmail’s server. In trying to do us a favor, they made life worse...  When I get back to a computer, I am going to try to delete the junk folder altogether, thus forcing all emails to the inbox, which would allow me to set rules. I suspect Outlook/Hotmail won’t let me do that...

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Last updated December 23, 2023 Views 1,100 Applies to: