While going through my Outlook junk folder, I noticed that nearly all my Azure related mails are classified as such.<p>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.<p>How comes that Microsoft would not just whitelist their own domains on their own e-mail service?
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.
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
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."<p>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.
It would seem they actually do whitelist some of their own stuff - specifically those weird "Microsoft Viva" emails that Outlook users get.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>For all that people like to bag on Google recently, Google has worked harder than anybody on this.
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.<p>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.<p>This seems appropriate and right, and not any indication of anything other than things work as they should.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
In other news, water is wet.<p>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.<p>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.
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".<p>I attributed this to the sheer incompetence of the local admins. The same organization later switched to O365, and the problem remained unchanged.
This was the breaking point for me leaving Microsoft 365.<p>I was losing a ton of important email because Microsoft would flag it as junk.<p>And even though I had complete admin rights over my tenant, I had no idea how to disable junk mail entirely.<p>(Also, fun fact, MS _still_ only gives you a 50GB mailbox! Google's at, like, a terabyte per user now...)
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: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png</a>
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?).<p>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.
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.<p>Maybe Microsoft has problems with people using Azure to send spam
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 <i>every single one</i> as spam but their system will not take the hint.
If you are subscribed to various emails and are not checking them often, Microsoft outlook will categorize them as junk.<p>Junk has a broad definition in outlook.com. It includes commercial emails too.
I have seen even some of Microsoft's invoices get trapped by their cloud mail filter as potential phishing.<p>This is another reason why we use a third party filter and dial the MS one way down.
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.
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.