Outlook Junk Mail Filter suddenly works poorly

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Windows 10 (up to date) and Outlook PC client provided by Microsoft 365 Family subscription.   No changes in configuration of Outlook recently.
Within the last few weeks, the Junk Mail filter seems worse than before.   Blatently obvious phishing attempts get through to my inbox while it continues to divert some legitimate emails to the Junk Mail folder.   Also the sheer amount of spam in the Junk Mail folder has way more than doubled.
I have the level of Junk Mail protection set at “Low” (“Move the most obvious junk mail…”).  I also set the “Warn me about suspicious domains” toggle but it never warns about them.  Does that even work?
Is there anything I can do on my end?  I do use the “Report Message” add-in regularly, but is anyone reading the reports?

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I find the performance of the Outlook filter to be inconsistent. It will work quite well the suddenly for a period of time all kinds of junk gets through. Have you tried setting the filter level to HIGH?

As far as the “Report Message” function goes, I believe that the reports are analyzed automatically as they occur. I don’t know the level of human involvement.

--Joe

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pumphouse

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At the office I bumped up the spam settings because they’ve been inconsistent.  On machines where I can’t control the spam filter levels up on their cloud servers, try this:

Change the level of protection in the Junk Email Filter – Microsoft Support

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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pumphouse

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Thanks all for the replies.   I guess I’ll move the level between High and Low as the tide of spam rises and falls with the moon.   

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FWIW, moving the level to “High” seemingly made no difference. Obvious phishing gets through and legitimate subscribed email gets caught. Sigh.

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I’m seeing the same issues, malformed subject lines like this have been getting past Outlook spam filters for months now. The malform appears to change regularly, probably as Microsoft adds one to its spam engine the spammer changes to something different. The key seems to be the very first “letter/special character”.

★2ND»ATTEMPT»FOR–U

 

 

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