MS Outlook junk mail

[Mr Optimistic]

Well over the last few months I have been getting increasing amounts of junk mail, 100's every few days. I have progressively created rules to divert these to the junk folder which seems to work except I have to clear the junk folder and check for the odd legitimate post. I got fed up with this and decided to start again so I deleted all the rules. Now I hardly get any junk mail....
It's almost as if creating a rule alerted the spammers to the target.
Can anyone explain this to me ?

[netstruggler]

Well over the last few months I have been getting increasing amounts of junk mail, 100's every few days. I have progressively created rules to divert these to the junk folder which seems to work except I have to clear the junk folder and check for the odd legitimate post. I got fed up with this and decided to start again so I deleted all the rules. Now I hardly get any junk mail....
It's almost as if creating a rule alerted the spammers to the target.
Can anyone explain this to me ?

Well No, I can't explain it but I can give you an opinion.

It's unlikely that the spammers have detected anything which you've done. It's generally not possible for a sender to trace what happens to an email after they've sent it.

Spam protection is an ongoing war betweent email providers, looking for reliable detection indicators, and the spammers trying to avoid detection.

The system I'm familiar with applies dozens of tests and each test has a score. Scores can be large or small, and positive (likely to be spam) or negative(likely to not be spam). Once all the scores are added together, if they exceed a pre-defined threshold then the message is treated as spam.

It's possible that your 'divert' rules were treated as a sign that you valued the messages and hence applied a negative spam value to the messages which brought them under the spam threshold.

It's also possible that by purging everything you removed some broken data that was causing the spam detector to fail.

...or it could be something else.


What sort of test were you using in the divert rules which you created yourself? Did they all come from the same source?

[Capt Scribble]

Interestingly, I use Yahoo mail. Over the past month the incoming spam has reduced markedly to just one or two a day. No idea why.

[Jhieminga]

Do you use Outlook as a web version or have you set it up using an IMAP connection? If that is the case, the rules you set may have influenced the built-in spam filter from your provider. As mentioned above, this could have led to it treating them as 'wanted'. My provider has a pretty good spam filter so I hardly ever get any spam in my inbox. The problem is that I regularly have to go through the junk folder to extract messages that should never have ended up in there. You win some, you lose some...

[Mr Optimistic]

Thanks. Yes I can only think that my rules have undermined the provider's spam filter. It is an IMAP connection and the rules were set up using the 'create rule' option, I have MS Office 2019. The reduction has been startling. Now on day 2 and there are a handful of items in the junk folder and only a couple in the inbox. Previously 50 a day was typical in the junk folder. Lots of the junk came from a constantly changing .rdl address with many from 'friki something'. They were crafty, adding changing punctuation marks to key words to evade the rule test, hence the proliferation of rules.
Thanks for your collective advice, lesson learnt. A bit of a pity as it negates the Outlook feature but there you go. There was me thinking I was doing the right thing....