Hotmail Spam Filter Not Working : Change the level of Hotmail protection in the Junk Email Filter
The reason why the Hotmail Spam Filter Not Working is that the Hotmail is set to no automatic spam filtering, so you may want to change your protection to High, which should do a better job of catching the spam.
If you’re experiencing issues with the Hotmail spam filter, here are some steps you can take to improve its efficiency:
- Adjust Filter Settings: Double-check your spam filter settings. Go to “Junk Email Options” and ensure that your “Safe Senders” and “Blocked Senders” lists are up to date.
- Set Protection Level to High: Consider changing the protection level to “High.” This setting captures spam more effectively.
- Block Individual Senders: If you receive spam from specific senders, block them. Mark their emails as “junk” to prevent them from cluttering your inbox.
- Report Spam Emails: When you encounter spam, report it. This helps improve the overall spam filter performance
Spam, or unwanted electronic mail, can be an annoyance. Messages that Outlook’s Junk E-mail Filter determines are spam are moved to the Junk E-mail folder. The amount of protection against spam email can be readily adjusted, and unwanted messages can be deleted mechanically.
Change the level of junk email protection
By default, the Junk Email Filter protection level is set to No Automatic Filtering. You can make the filter more aggressive so that it catches more junk messages. The higher you set the protection level, the greater the risk of some legitimate messages being identified as junk and moved to the Junk E-mail folder.
- Click Home > Delete group > Junk > Junk E-mail Options.
- Choose the level of protection you want.
- No Automatic Filtering Although this turns off the automatic Junk Email Filter, messages are still evaluated by using the domain names and email addresses in your Blocked Senders List.
Note: If you want to turn off the Junk Email Filter, you must also remove names from the Junk Email Filter lists.
- Low If you don’t receive many junk messages, or want to filter only the messages that are the most obvious junk, select this option.
- High If you receive lots of junk messages, but don’t want to restrict messages from senders on your safe lists, select this option. We recommend you occasionally check the Junk E-mail folder to make sure that a message you wanted isn’t moved in error.
- Safe Lists Only This is the most restrictive option. Any message that isn’t from someone on your Safe Senders List or isn’t to a mailing list on your Safe Recipients List, is classified as junk.
- No Automatic Filtering Although this turns off the automatic Junk Email Filter, messages are still evaluated by using the domain names and email addresses in your Blocked Senders List.
Just delete them!
You can tell Outlook to delete all suspected junk messages instead of moving them to the Junk E-mail folder. This takes away your ability to review messages for possible false positives, so consider the risks of using this option.
- In Mail, click Home > Junk > Junk E-mail Options
- On the Options tab, check the Permanently delete suspected junk email instead of moving it to the Junk E-mail folder box
Why is my Hotmail not filtering spam?
1. By default, Hotmail is set to no automatic filtering, so you may want to change your protection to High, which should do a better job of catching the spam. If you’re fed up of deleting the messages in your Junk folder, you can easily set it to automatically delete anything suspected as spam.
2. Verify that your address is not on the Safe Sender or Safe Recipient list. These two lists override the Blocked Sender list and the junk mail filter.
3. If you set up a filter for incoming mail to have that mail starred or marked as important, but the filter is broad enough to catch some spam, that spam will be marked in your inbox rather than sent to the junk folder.
4. Microsoft advises you can gain access to all the email settings by clicking the “gear icon” at the top of the page and then choosing “View all Outlook settings.” Select the “Junk email” tab to gain access to those options.