11 ms·

Tell HN: Microsoft classifies own emails as junk

173 points by YellowTech 4y ago

While going through my Outlook junk folder, I noticed that nearly all my Azure related mails are classified as such. These e-mails are all real and also sent by addresses like azure@email.microsoft.com with the source SMTP server being in a subdomain of PROD.OUTLOOK.COM. How comes that Microsoft would not just whitelist their own domains on their own e-mail service?

PaulHoule 4y ago
After failed Sears and Roebucks, I think Microsoft is the #2 company of all time for "the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing." It's notorious that they have a hard time replicating products that competitors make look simple: look how the Steam store really works for for games, or how Dropbox works so much better than Onedrive.
- permo-w 4y ago
  has dropbox not been on life support for a good 5 years now?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Might look like so for consumers, Dropbox is focusing on enterprise, like the traditional startup path of "scrappy startup for consumers -> some new features for companies -> everything is for enterprise". If you want your stock value to increase, profits has to too, so targeting the segment the most money is exchanged makes sense. But argh so boring.
- qsort 4y ago
  Yes, I can't wrap my head around the fact that VS Code and Teams came out of the same company. That the same people who thought "it's a good idea to use CS theory to add a type system to Javascript" are the same people who thought "it's a good idea to put ads in the start menu".
  - jerrre 4y ago
    Isn't that just because it's an unfathomably huge company with a very broad range of products
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      Sometimes I wonder if there is some kind of upside down "virtue signalling" going on. Ads in the Start Menu might not make a lot of money but investors might be impressed that Microsoft is at least trying to make a few more cents here and there. I wonder if Amazon treats employees so poorly not because this is good for business but because it helps Wall Street accept Amazon's loss-making habits (at least they aren't being generous with the help) and maybe convinces a few customers that Amazon is trying really hard to serve them well.
      - throw_pm23 4y ago
        So "vice signalling", maybe?
        santoshalper 4y ago
        That needs to be a thing.
        rchaud 4y ago
        I would love for society to return to using "virtue-signaling" and "vice-signaling" in their original meaning, instead of this contemporary linguistic hell where the former is a derogatory synonym for political correctness.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        Won't happen. 3000 years from now conservatives will be reading from their "Old Testament" about the evils of political correctness even if they are hazy about the details as if Stanford was on the East Coast or the West Coast. There was a blog post that got flagged this morning where somebody was complaining about those "In those house we believe signs..." which I haven't seen around for a year or so.
- Zetobal 4y ago
  The gun meme always seemed kind of fitting. https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&for...
- crazygringo 4y ago
  No, literally every large company with a wide variety of products is like that. It's a fundamental problem of organizations operating across a wide variety of domains, because communication doesn't scale.
- patja 4y ago
  When OneDrive works it is nice. Problem is that when it doesn't work, you can be in for a hell of a ride trying to get it working. I just finished spending more hours than I want to count trying to clean my dad's PC of all licensing and account connections to his former employer's use of Office and OneDrive and onto his personal account and license. In hindsight I wish I had just nuked and paved it, or bought him an iPad with keyboard and mouse.
ggambetta 4y ago
Gotta appreciate the honesty!
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Spam filters working as intended.
hunter2_ 4y ago
If customers are able to influence the content and recipient of these messages, they could use it for spam.
zvolsky 4y ago
The fact that Microsoft doesn't just whitelist their own domains speaks to their commitment to strict security measures and good engineering culture. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
- toomanydoubts 4y ago
  >speaks to their commitment to strict security measures and good engineering culture Does it really or does it just mean that nobody cared enough to do it for whatever reason?
  - santoshalper 4y ago
    I'm sure the Azure people are aware and annoyed. I appreciate that the security people are holding the line.
    - jamespo 4y ago
      Or Microsoft are just terrible at classifying spam
      - 13of40 4y ago
        One of the signals they use for classifying spam is people clicking "Report Message->Junk" in Outlook, so it's probably a constant battle with people who forget they signed up for something and call it junk.
        ghaff 4y ago
        People forget they signed up for something, didn't opt-out, got on some list from a conference they attended, etc. and just report as Spam even though there's an unsubscribe link. Frankly, the vast bulk of the email in my Spam folder isn't egregious fake medicine and the like. It's mostly low quality mailing lists, much of which isn't much different from what ends up in my inbox.
jasonlotito 4y ago
Is this not what you would want? What you classify as junk might be something someone else reads. But I would want any junk filter to be based on my usage. In fact, the suggest that they should whitelist their own domains seems to be fairly monopolistic, something Microsoft has had to deal with in the past. This seems appropriate and right, and not any indication of anything other than things work as they should.
cerved 4y ago
I signed up for a Teams developer environment to develop and test sending email using office 365. I was able to send one email from this and the rest would just get caught in spam filters but not at the inbox level. Maybe Microsoft has problems with people using Azure to send spam
RajT88 4y ago
I saw a bunch of mails just now in my junk folder from Microsoft support engineers, from threads I was CC'd on. That was it though.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Thats really bad honestly, imagine if you missed something important from Azure because its in a spam filter.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    You must not be signed up for those emails (at least not for an environment of any real scale), because the most common reason people miss those mails is not because they ended up in the wrong folder, it's because there's too many of them to be able to read them all. It's an incredibly common problem. Super important email, like an outage is brewing, or they are EOL'ing something which is going to blow you up (like older TLS versions), and yeah, you got it, but you probably didn't read it.
InfamousRece 4y ago
It’s possible that many users classify them as junk and so the Bayesian filters learn from that. Plus they might actually be junk. The filters are usually content based.
- rollcat 4y ago
  Yep, my first reaction was, "seems to work as designed". The fix isn't to whitelist, the fix is to make their own emails more relevant (or easier to unsubscribe from).
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    I’ve known people who use the spam button for any email they do’t want right now. They say “it’s easier” than hitting the “unsbuscribe” link or they say “if I hit unsubscribe they’ll just send me more email”. It’s hard to maintain a rational filtering system under those circumstances.
    - i80and 4y ago
      I've seen faked brand emails hit my Gmail inbox with (presumably malicious) unsubscribe links, and I've definitely seen sites "forget" that I've unsubscribed. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons, but I think the state of email is such that simply reporting unwanted email as spam is a rational choice
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > “if I hit unsubscribe they’ll just send me more email” This is likely true if the email is from a spammer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brightball 4y ago
Microsoft's disjointed approach to email doesn't surprise me here. They're actively enabling more phishing and fraud by not respecting the DMARC standard or participating in sending aggregate reports. For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Then again, Google benefits if email goes away entirely. Ditto Meta and, yes, Microsoft. We are seeing the initial skirmishes in a knock-down, drag-out war that users are going to lose.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > They're actively enabling more phishing and fraud by not respecting the DMARC standard or participating in sending aggregate reports. Yep. There are situations where they'll simply ignore DMARC aligned messages if they don't like the content, filter them into (admin only) quarantine, and refuse to let you create rules for special cases so you receive important messages. I know because I've had it happen.
- natch 4y ago
  > For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this. Oh come on. Back when they first built Gmail, maybe sure. But in the last 10 years or so? They’ve been totally ignoring the fact that they categorize their own non-marketing non-spammy emails, specifically requested on specific non-spammy topics by the user, generated by Google, and sent by Google, as spam. I don’t think they have worked harder than anybody on this. Snacked harder, maybe.
  - brightball 4y ago
    For advancement and adoption of standards to help combat this stuff, yes they have indeed. Yahoo as well. Most other companies seem interested in selling band-aids to repeated cuts than preventing the cuts in the first place.
rossdavidh 4y ago
In a roundabout way, this is to Microsoft's credit, sort of...
INGSOCIALITE 4y ago
So the spam filter works better than expected, in a proven environment!
jnsaff2 4y ago
So MS keeps sending me email thinking I am part of some program, I can't unsubscribe because I need to sign in to do that, which I can't do because I am not part of the program (anymore?). So for me they are spam and I will mark them as such. I'm on fastmail tho so not sure whether they get the feedback.
Kosirich 4y ago
Yep, happened to me just last week with Azure Learning emails.
manuelmoreale 4y ago
Mentioned before in another thread. Google workspace flagged an email from Google domains as spam. And it wasn't even a marketing email from them. It was a reminder that I had a .dev domain about to be renewed. I guess that's what happens when you're just too big. And I don't blame the Gmail team. Google has probably launched and killed a thousand products with a thousand domains so curating that whitelist is probably a hard job
- YellowTech 4y ago
  The specific emails that were marked for me were also reminders about a subscription. Interesting!
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Maybe all these new AI aren't that smart after all. I just checked and in my case the email was coming from domains-noreply@google.com so you'd think that Gmail is smart enough to not flag as spam an email from google.com and yet...
  - andai 4y ago
    Must be a common phishing scam. "Your domain is about to expire, enter your Google username and password to renew it!" If it was me, I'd pattern those emails to be exactly like the real ones. So then the real ones might get flagged by the spam filters too. You'd think they'd check who's sending them though (origin server)...
- thomaslord 4y ago
  I've run into this issue when creating G Suite accounts and sending the initial welcome email (with password reset link) to a user's personal Gmail account. Somehow delivering an email with content written by Google, from Google to Google, is an issue.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  They don't even need a curated whitelist for high value domains do they? If they've seen 1 million emails from @domains.google and <.1% got flagged as spam, isn't that a good enough indicator to consider the domain a good actor? I can understand the difficulty in judging new domains, but having established, high value, high volume domains getting their email flagged as spam is ridiculous. It could also be anti-competitive behaviour. They want the system to be a complex, opaque, black box because then it's more important for other providers to trust their IP ranges because they're a known-good participant. If you're a small sender that wants decent deliverability your options are Google, MS, etc..
threemux 4y ago
Google does this too with emails from Google Groups. It knows I'm subscribed to that group!
extr0pian 4y ago
Somewhat related, I had recently tried sending an email to legal@microsoft.com and my emails were rejected. I tried a couple of times using two domains and I could only assume they were blocked because I had "microsoft" in the username (so "microsoft@[mydomain].is" and "microsoft@[mydomain].xyz". I guess it's understandable as sending an email with "microsoft" in the username could be construed as a phishing attempt against Microsoft employees.
ama5322 4y ago
In my old organization, internal emails (same domain, internally sent) were regularly classified as spam if the UA wasn't outlook. "Clutter" added another circle of hell, as not only you had to explain "check your junk folder" but also "check your clutter folder". I attributed this to the sheer incompetence of the local admins. The same organization later switched to O365, and the problem remained unchanged.
elicash 4y ago
Don't a lot of the companies outsource to Spamhaus?
hooby 4y ago
It would seem they actually do whitelist some of their own stuff - specifically those weird "Microsoft Viva" emails that Outlook users get. A year or two ago, I did get Outlook to classify those emails as "Junk" automatically, by repeatedly reporting them - but then something changed, and after that they never were marked as "junk" again - no matter how often I do report them.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I've never gotten a Microsoft Viva email across a couple of O365 accounts but none of the orgs ever set up Viva to my knowledge. If it's something your org set up it'd make sense it could break the rules, otherwise dunno.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Those emails are awful, but in fairness to Microsoft, there is a link in them that takes you to the settings page where you can turn them off. It worked for me, and I haven't received another one after that.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  Those e-mails can be easily turned off. I suppose they are not really e-mails, but rather something hybrid that happens on the Exchange server and bypasses the usual e-mail pipeline.
mmzeeman 4y ago
My work office365 mailbox is unusable. Normal mails ends up in spam or quarantine, or gets delivered with a very large delay.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  TBF that might not be MS's fault. My work office365 mailbox is similar, but it was about the same before we moved to office365 due to additional filtering our IT does in the name of security.
patja 4y ago
Every day I also get at least a dozen very obvious phishing emails that end up in my primary Hotmail inbox. The algorithm just doesn't seem very good.
sys32768 4y ago
I have seen even some of Microsoft's invoices get trapped by their cloud mail filter as potential phishing. This is another reason why we use a third party filter and dial the MS one way down.
rawoke083600 4y ago
Email is hard :)
Moissanite 4y ago
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day"
fractalb 4y ago
Isn't it because of the fact that the from addresses on an email are not reliable?
s1mon 4y ago
In other news, water is wet. Junk email classification seems to be hard for everyone. I've seen Apple and Google do similar things with their respective email clients and messages from their own companies. At a previous job, we might have lost a significant contract if I hadn't been checking my Gmail junk folder. A former client was trying to contact me from a new company about potential work, and Gmail must have thought the start-up's domain was risky.
cool-RR 4y ago
Google has been doing the same for years.
tims33 4y ago
Hard to believe that they've owned Hotmail/Outlook.com for over 20 years and their spam filtering is still atrocious. Gmail is 100x better and so is O365.
JohnFen 4y ago
Since I have yet to receive an email from Microsoft that wasn't junk, I wish my Outlook installation marked it all as spam, too.
Double_a_92 4y ago
Something is generally wrong with Microsofts spam filter. I had to use workflows to completely disable it, because it started putting important things in it. Literally emails from people that answered to emails I initiated...
nashashmi 4y ago
If you are subscribed to various emails and are not checking them often, Microsoft outlook will categorize them as junk. Junk has a broad definition in outlook.com. It includes commercial emails too.
sabarn01 4y ago
Because Exchange and Azure are different orgs, and its very hard to get privileged send access.
theSoenke 4y ago
Since weeks I have the opposite problem that outlook.com does not seem to detect spam at all anymore. Getting a dozen obvious spam emails a day right in my inbox
mike256 4y ago
You're lucky that those mails reached your account. Don't use Microsoft services for email. Especially not outlook.com ones. Sometimes mails sent from little private mail servers just vanish. Not in Inbox, not in Spam. Also no error for the sender. Very bad.
cm2187 4y ago
I noticed the opposite. Outlook refuses to classify microsoft's spam as junk and let me block it.
natch 4y ago
Same with Google.
peakminute 4y ago
[dead]
aendruk 4y ago
I wish! A couple years ago without my consent Microsoft started sending me daily and weekly messages that hype meaningless metrics about how much I use Microsoft products. I’ve flagged every single one as spam but their system will not take the hint.
nocsi 4y ago
Why would you want Microsoft to trust Microsoft? Good on them for not trusting themselves, makes a secure baseline
jimnotgym 4y ago
Were the emails junk though? You didn't mention if they were emails you wanted or not?
butz 4y ago
Month or two ago I was getting a lot of spam from Microsoft domains, good to know that they finally caught up and solved the issue. In a special, Microsoft way.
callamdelaney 4y ago
They've been sending me emails in some nordic language for years unprompted by me.
klyrs 4y ago
I always mark that stuff junk. You're welcome.
nunez 4y ago
This was the breaking point for me leaving Microsoft 365. I was losing a ton of important email because Microsoft would flag it as junk. And even though I had complete admin rights over my tenant, I had no idea how to disable junk mail entirely. (Also, fun fact, MS _still_ only gives you a 50GB mailbox! Google's at, like, a terabyte per user now...)
renonce 4y ago
Microsoft is well known to be organized as a set of teams that hate each other. Azure and Outlook are likely two different teams. There is a famous comic for that: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png

173 points by YellowTech 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

After failed Sears and Roebucks, I think Microsoft is the #2 company of all time for "the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing." It's notorious that they have a hard time replicating products that competitors make look simple: look how the Steam store really works for for games, or how Dropbox works so much better than Onedrive.

permo-w 4y ago
has dropbox not been on life support for a good 5 years now?
- capableweb 4y ago
  Might look like so for consumers, Dropbox is focusing on enterprise, like the traditional startup path of "scrappy startup for consumers -> some new features for companies -> everything is for enterprise". If you want your stock value to increase, profits has to too, so targeting the segment the most money is exchanged makes sense. But argh so boring.
qsort 4y ago
Yes, I can't wrap my head around the fact that VS Code and Teams came out of the same company. That the same people who thought "it's a good idea to use CS theory to add a type system to Javascript" are the same people who thought "it's a good idea to put ads in the start menu".
- jerrre 4y ago
  Isn't that just because it's an unfathomably huge company with a very broad range of products
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if there is some kind of upside down "virtue signalling" going on. Ads in the Start Menu might not make a lot of money but investors might be impressed that Microsoft is at least trying to make a few more cents here and there. I wonder if Amazon treats employees so poorly not because this is good for business but because it helps Wall Street accept Amazon's loss-making habits (at least they aren't being generous with the help) and maybe convinces a few customers that Amazon is trying really hard to serve them well.
    - throw_pm23 4y ago
      So "vice signalling", maybe?
      - santoshalper 4y ago
        That needs to be a thing.
      - rchaud 4y ago
        I would love for society to return to using "virtue-signaling" and "vice-signaling" in their original meaning, instead of this contemporary linguistic hell where the former is a derogatory synonym for political correctness.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        Won't happen. 3000 years from now conservatives will be reading from their "Old Testament" about the evils of political correctness even if they are hazy about the details as if Stanford was on the East Coast or the West Coast. There was a blog post that got flagged this morning where somebody was complaining about those "In those house we believe signs..." which I haven't seen around for a year or so.
Zetobal 4y ago
The gun meme always seemed kind of fitting. https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/4e0b3416cadcbb0d37010000?width=400&for...
crazygringo 4y ago
No, literally every large company with a wide variety of products is like that. It's a fundamental problem of organizations operating across a wide variety of domains, because communication doesn't scale.
patja 4y ago
When OneDrive works it is nice. Problem is that when it doesn't work, you can be in for a hell of a ride trying to get it working. I just finished spending more hours than I want to count trying to clean my dad's PC of all licensing and account connections to his former employer's use of Office and OneDrive and onto his personal account and license. In hindsight I wish I had just nuked and paved it, or bought him an iPad with keyboard and mouse.

ggambetta 4y ago

Gotta appreciate the honesty!

moffkalast 4y ago
Spam filters working as intended.

hunter2_ 4y ago

If customers are able to influence the content and recipient of these messages, they could use it for spam.

zvolsky 4y ago

The fact that Microsoft doesn't just whitelist their own domains speaks to their commitment to strict security measures and good engineering culture. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

toomanydoubts 4y ago
>speaks to their commitment to strict security measures and good engineering culture Does it really or does it just mean that nobody cared enough to do it for whatever reason?
- santoshalper 4y ago
  I'm sure the Azure people are aware and annoyed. I appreciate that the security people are holding the line.
  - jamespo 4y ago
    Or Microsoft are just terrible at classifying spam
    - 13of40 4y ago
      One of the signals they use for classifying spam is people clicking "Report Message->Junk" in Outlook, so it's probably a constant battle with people who forget they signed up for something and call it junk.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        People forget they signed up for something, didn't opt-out, got on some list from a conference they attended, etc. and just report as Spam even though there's an unsubscribe link. Frankly, the vast bulk of the email in my Spam folder isn't egregious fake medicine and the like. It's mostly low quality mailing lists, much of which isn't much different from what ends up in my inbox.

jasonlotito 4y ago

Is this not what you would want? What you classify as junk might be something someone else reads. But I would want any junk filter to be based on my usage. In fact, the suggest that they should whitelist their own domains seems to be fairly monopolistic, something Microsoft has had to deal with in the past. This seems appropriate and right, and not any indication of anything other than things work as they should.

cerved 4y ago

I signed up for a Teams developer environment to develop and test sending email using office 365. I was able to send one email from this and the rest would just get caught in spam filters but not at the inbox level. Maybe Microsoft has problems with people using Azure to send spam

RajT88 4y ago

I saw a bunch of mails just now in my junk folder from Microsoft support engineers, from threads I was CC'd on. That was it though.

giancarlostoro 4y ago
Thats really bad honestly, imagine if you missed something important from Azure because its in a spam filter.
- RajT88 4y ago
  You must not be signed up for those emails (at least not for an environment of any real scale), because the most common reason people miss those mails is not because they ended up in the wrong folder, it's because there's too many of them to be able to read them all. It's an incredibly common problem. Super important email, like an outage is brewing, or they are EOL'ing something which is going to blow you up (like older TLS versions), and yeah, you got it, but you probably didn't read it.

InfamousRece 4y ago

It’s possible that many users classify them as junk and so the Bayesian filters learn from that. Plus they might actually be junk. The filters are usually content based.

rollcat 4y ago
Yep, my first reaction was, "seems to work as designed". The fix isn't to whitelist, the fix is to make their own emails more relevant (or easier to unsubscribe from).
- Tagbert 4y ago
  I’ve known people who use the spam button for any email they do’t want right now. They say “it’s easier” than hitting the “unsbuscribe” link or they say “if I hit unsubscribe they’ll just send me more email”. It’s hard to maintain a rational filtering system under those circumstances.
  - i80and 4y ago
    I've seen faked brand emails hit my Gmail inbox with (presumably malicious) unsubscribe links, and I've definitely seen sites "forget" that I've unsubscribed. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons, but I think the state of email is such that simply reporting unwanted email as spam is a rational choice
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > “if I hit unsubscribe they’ll just send me more email” This is likely true if the email is from a spammer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brightball 4y ago

Microsoft's disjointed approach to email doesn't surprise me here. They're actively enabling more phishing and fraud by not respecting the DMARC standard or participating in sending aggregate reports. For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Then again, Google benefits if email goes away entirely. Ditto Meta and, yes, Microsoft. We are seeing the initial skirmishes in a knock-down, drag-out war that users are going to lose.
donmcronald 4y ago
> They're actively enabling more phishing and fraud by not respecting the DMARC standard or participating in sending aggregate reports. Yep. There are situations where they'll simply ignore DMARC aligned messages if they don't like the content, filter them into (admin only) quarantine, and refuse to let you create rules for special cases so you receive important messages. I know because I've had it happen.
natch 4y ago
> For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this. Oh come on. Back when they first built Gmail, maybe sure. But in the last 10 years or so? They’ve been totally ignoring the fact that they categorize their own non-marketing non-spammy emails, specifically requested on specific non-spammy topics by the user, generated by Google, and sent by Google, as spam. I don’t think they have worked harder than anybody on this. Snacked harder, maybe.
- brightball 4y ago
  For advancement and adoption of standards to help combat this stuff, yes they have indeed. Yahoo as well. Most other companies seem interested in selling band-aids to repeated cuts than preventing the cuts in the first place.

rossdavidh 4y ago

In a roundabout way, this is to Microsoft's credit, sort of...

INGSOCIALITE 4y ago

So the spam filter works better than expected, in a proven environment!

jnsaff2 4y ago

So MS keeps sending me email thinking I am part of some program, I can't unsubscribe because I need to sign in to do that, which I can't do because I am not part of the program (anymore?). So for me they are spam and I will mark them as such. I'm on fastmail tho so not sure whether they get the feedback.

Kosirich 4y ago

Yep, happened to me just last week with Azure Learning emails.

manuelmoreale 4y ago

Mentioned before in another thread. Google workspace flagged an email from Google domains as spam. And it wasn't even a marketing email from them. It was a reminder that I had a .dev domain about to be renewed. I guess that's what happens when you're just too big. And I don't blame the Gmail team. Google has probably launched and killed a thousand products with a thousand domains so curating that whitelist is probably a hard job

YellowTech 4y ago
The specific emails that were marked for me were also reminders about a subscription. Interesting!
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Maybe all these new AI aren't that smart after all. I just checked and in my case the email was coming from domains-noreply@google.com so you'd think that Gmail is smart enough to not flag as spam an email from google.com and yet...
- andai 4y ago
  Must be a common phishing scam. "Your domain is about to expire, enter your Google username and password to renew it!" If it was me, I'd pattern those emails to be exactly like the real ones. So then the real ones might get flagged by the spam filters too. You'd think they'd check who's sending them though (origin server)...
thomaslord 4y ago
I've run into this issue when creating G Suite accounts and sending the initial welcome email (with password reset link) to a user's personal Gmail account. Somehow delivering an email with content written by Google, from Google to Google, is an issue.
donmcronald 4y ago
They don't even need a curated whitelist for high value domains do they? If they've seen 1 million emails from @domains.google and <.1% got flagged as spam, isn't that a good enough indicator to consider the domain a good actor? I can understand the difficulty in judging new domains, but having established, high value, high volume domains getting their email flagged as spam is ridiculous. It could also be anti-competitive behaviour. They want the system to be a complex, opaque, black box because then it's more important for other providers to trust their IP ranges because they're a known-good participant. If you're a small sender that wants decent deliverability your options are Google, MS, etc..

threemux 4y ago

Google does this too with emails from Google Groups. It knows I'm subscribed to that group!

extr0pian 4y ago

Somewhat related, I had recently tried sending an email to legal@microsoft.com and my emails were rejected. I tried a couple of times using two domains and I could only assume they were blocked because I had "microsoft" in the username (so "microsoft@[mydomain].is" and "microsoft@[mydomain].xyz". I guess it's understandable as sending an email with "microsoft" in the username could be construed as a phishing attempt against Microsoft employees.

ama5322 4y ago

In my old organization, internal emails (same domain, internally sent) were regularly classified as spam if the UA wasn't outlook. "Clutter" added another circle of hell, as not only you had to explain "check your junk folder" but also "check your clutter folder". I attributed this to the sheer incompetence of the local admins. The same organization later switched to O365, and the problem remained unchanged.

elicash 4y ago

Don't a lot of the companies outsource to Spamhaus?

hooby 4y ago

It would seem they actually do whitelist some of their own stuff - specifically those weird "Microsoft Viva" emails that Outlook users get. A year or two ago, I did get Outlook to classify those emails as "Junk" automatically, by repeatedly reporting them - but then something changed, and after that they never were marked as "junk" again - no matter how often I do report them.

zamadatix 4y ago
I've never gotten a Microsoft Viva email across a couple of O365 accounts but none of the orgs ever set up Viva to my knowledge. If it's something your org set up it'd make sense it could break the rules, otherwise dunno.
JohnFen 4y ago
Those emails are awful, but in fairness to Microsoft, there is a link in them that takes you to the settings page where you can turn them off. It worked for me, and I haven't received another one after that.
Kwpolska 4y ago
Those e-mails can be easily turned off. I suppose they are not really e-mails, but rather something hybrid that happens on the Exchange server and bypasses the usual e-mail pipeline.

mmzeeman 4y ago

My work office365 mailbox is unusable. Normal mails ends up in spam or quarantine, or gets delivered with a very large delay.

Marsymars 4y ago
TBF that might not be MS's fault. My work office365 mailbox is similar, but it was about the same before we moved to office365 due to additional filtering our IT does in the name of security.

patja 4y ago

Every day I also get at least a dozen very obvious phishing emails that end up in my primary Hotmail inbox. The algorithm just doesn't seem very good.

sys32768 4y ago

I have seen even some of Microsoft's invoices get trapped by their cloud mail filter as potential phishing. This is another reason why we use a third party filter and dial the MS one way down.

rawoke083600 4y ago

Email is hard :)

Moissanite 4y ago

"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day"

fractalb 4y ago

Isn't it because of the fact that the from addresses on an email are not reliable?

s1mon 4y ago

In other news, water is wet. Junk email classification seems to be hard for everyone. I've seen Apple and Google do similar things with their respective email clients and messages from their own companies. At a previous job, we might have lost a significant contract if I hadn't been checking my Gmail junk folder. A former client was trying to contact me from a new company about potential work, and Gmail must have thought the start-up's domain was risky.

cool-RR 4y ago

Google has been doing the same for years.

tims33 4y ago

Hard to believe that they've owned Hotmail/Outlook.com for over 20 years and their spam filtering is still atrocious. Gmail is 100x better and so is O365.

JohnFen 4y ago

Since I have yet to receive an email from Microsoft that wasn't junk, I wish my Outlook installation marked it all as spam, too.

Double_a_92 4y ago

Something is generally wrong with Microsofts spam filter. I had to use workflows to completely disable it, because it started putting important things in it. Literally emails from people that answered to emails I initiated...

nashashmi 4y ago

If you are subscribed to various emails and are not checking them often, Microsoft outlook will categorize them as junk. Junk has a broad definition in outlook.com. It includes commercial emails too.

sabarn01 4y ago

Because Exchange and Azure are different orgs, and its very hard to get privileged send access.

theSoenke 4y ago

Since weeks I have the opposite problem that outlook.com does not seem to detect spam at all anymore. Getting a dozen obvious spam emails a day right in my inbox

mike256 4y ago

You're lucky that those mails reached your account. Don't use Microsoft services for email. Especially not outlook.com ones. Sometimes mails sent from little private mail servers just vanish. Not in Inbox, not in Spam. Also no error for the sender. Very bad.

cm2187 4y ago

I noticed the opposite. Outlook refuses to classify microsoft's spam as junk and let me block it.

natch 4y ago

Same with Google.

peakminute 4y ago

[dead]

aendruk 4y ago

I wish! A couple years ago without my consent Microsoft started sending me daily and weekly messages that hype meaningless metrics about how much I use Microsoft products. I’ve flagged every single one as spam but their system will not take the hint.

nocsi 4y ago

Why would you want Microsoft to trust Microsoft? Good on them for not trusting themselves, makes a secure baseline

jimnotgym 4y ago

Were the emails junk though? You didn't mention if they were emails you wanted or not?

butz 4y ago

Month or two ago I was getting a lot of spam from Microsoft domains, good to know that they finally caught up and solved the issue. In a special, Microsoft way.

callamdelaney 4y ago

They've been sending me emails in some nordic language for years unprompted by me.

klyrs 4y ago

I always mark that stuff junk. You're welcome.

nunez 4y ago

This was the breaking point for me leaving Microsoft 365. I was losing a ton of important email because Microsoft would flag it as junk. And even though I had complete admin rights over my tenant, I had no idea how to disable junk mail entirely. (Also, fun fact, MS _still_ only gives you a 50GB mailbox! Google's at, like, a terabyte per user now...)

renonce 4y ago

Microsoft is well known to be organized as a set of teams that hate each other. Azure and Outlook are likely two different teams. There is a famous comic for that: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png