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Rebecca Thomas's avatar
Rebecca Thomas
Copper Contributor
Nov 26, 2017

nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

I have used Outlook for many years.  My email address is @msn.com.  Over the years I managed to clear out most all spam emails in my inbox and get it all directed to the junk folder and it's been great to not have that crap in my inbox anymore.  However, as a result of Hurricane Harvey and my need to search the internet for items to repair my house, I have subscribed to a few websites so that I can get information from them.  The BIG problem is that with each one of those subscriptions, I am also get a overload of junk mail in my inbox that has nothing to do with my subscriptions and I cannot get rid of them.  I have unsubscribed over and over and marked them as junk but they still keep coming back into my inbox.  This really pisses me off!  I don't have time to clean up my inbox of crap every time I go into my email. 

 

I want it fixed!  And I don't want to have to get on the phone and wait an hour to talk to someone who is not going to know what to do or rather will make the matter worse.

 

It's great that Outlook wants to keep us safe, but this is not keeping me safe and it's keeping me in a really bad mood when I get loads and loads of trash in my Inbox.  I've always deleted my span instead of clearing it out because I want to make sure I didn't miss something important.  But now I have to sift through crap in my inbox also just to find my legitimate email.

 

Very irritated and unhappy Outlook user.  It used to be the absolutely only way for me to go with my email.  Now I am starting to think I need to see if there is something I can change to.

 

Becky Thomas

  • I'm trying to understand the specifics of your issue here, as Outlook.com provides an element of junk filtering - but if your email has been given to a website and subsequently used by other senders that's beyond their scope.
    I would suggest reporting the bad senders to appropriate authorities and systems where it can be handled.
    What is junk for you may be legitimate email for another person.
    Sorry I know that's not the answer you're probably looking for but there's limited capabilities with free email services.
  • Jay82SE-LLM's avatar
    Jay82SE-LLM
    Copper Contributor
    Hey Becky! I just stumbled upon your post and felt – even though I realize it’s very old by now – that I’d like to say something. First off; my rationale for providing input at all is the simple fact of how strongly I can relate. I’ve been fortunate enough to catch a [lastname]@hotmail.com in the ‘90s and later on, a [firstname]@[lastname].net domain and chose that e-mail. I’ve been finding myself in your shoes with the hotmail-address trying to fend off all spam while making sure not to miss out important stuff. That fight is practically lost on the hotmail address but still going flawless with my private domain mail. Anyway. I am from Sweden and a couple of years ago, the whole European community was forced to implement legislation that was decided on the EC level; namely the so-called GDPR that only serves to protect personal information (broadly defined as ~ anything that could be connected to an individual).. at least for the first year, it was just a pain in the **bleep** to be frank but now we are starting to see the benefits of it. For example, your personal information cannot be processed by anyone unless you explicitly have agreed to. Moreover, it’s forbidden to sell or otherwise transfer such information to a third-party without your explicit consent. You have a so-called right to be forgotten, whereby an organization or corporation is forced to delete any and all information related to you and you also have a right to get an identical copy of every single bit of data that they have that relate to you. This is called portation. I was kind of flabbergasted when I tried this with Google since it took a couple of days for them to complete my request which ended up in the form of an email with links to approximately 15 separate compressed files, each several gigabytes in size. Probably you can trace my every single footstep since 15 years back, literally every single step – left and right(!) 😉 – not only online but off-line as well. Kinda scary. So when we’ve had some time with this new legislation, I do believe that it actually have brought more positive dumb bad and could definitely serve as inspiration for the US to pick some bits and pieces from. I would definitely contact my politicians in your shoes. Last but not least; I definitely know and relate to the fact that you kind of get attached to your email address. But since it seems like there is gonna be difficult in the long term to keep the SPAM at the Bay, I would definitely recommend you to buy a personalized domain with the hosting that includes email that you can buy in like a minute for 10 bucks; especially since there’s YouTube domains released constantly and you can find pretty cool ones nowadays that suits your personality or where you’re from, profession or your last name for example. Wish you all the best! 👊 / JJ :sweden: [I dictate everything I “write” on my phone which generally causes a couple of grammatical or spelling mishaps. It should however be clear, based on the context, what I actually intended to say.]

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