Forum Discussion
Microsoft To Do Flagged Email List has Created a New Attack Surface for Junk Email
- Update: On January 29, I finally got a response directly from a support engineer on the To Do team! He acknowledged that the issue was being addressed and asked me to keep in touch with any updates. Since then, I'm happy to report that the To Do Flagged and Important smartlists have been SPAM free. The only exception was a temporary, regression on Feb 19 that was repatched within 24 hours.
Now we can enjoy SPAM free To Do smartlists. Note: Any junk mail that made its way into To Do before this issue was fixed will have to be removed manually.
I Never found a way to delete them enmasse, but it certainly helped to first sort everything 'by importance' since the spammers typically sent them as 'High importance' (which shows up as 'starred' in Microsoft To Do) This can be done either in the phone app (via sort options) or Outlook desktop. Then, I chose to actually 'delete' them (vs just checking as 'done' since I didn't want them to still be listed if I chose to view my 'completed' tasks) Meanwhile, things seem to have greatly improved recently! i.e. some days no new ones added, so there's hope if you're willing to wade through all of the old 'garbage'
Since my post over a year ago this issue has been surfacing and then sorting itself out again shortly afterwards. It must be something to do with the way updates are rollled out.
As all the offending items are marked as spam/junk it is a simple case of empting the spam/junk email folder. But it is annoying when it happens. The very occasional email the arrives which is not marked as spam can be soon dealt with in the usual way.