A reader is being bombarded by spam responses:
“Hi Cynthia, love your Tech Tips! I keep a lot of them in a dedicated email folder – and share quite a few!
My Hotmail inbox is FLOODED with “Mail Delivery Subsystem” backscatter emails! Apparently scammers are spoofing my email address to send spam – they’re not coming from my account, there’s nothing in the “Sent” folder, but my inbox is deluged with “undeliverable” reports! The spam is all linked to the .xyz domain. Is there any way to set up Outlook/Hotmail to automatically delete these things?
Old articles speak about setting up rules in Outlook, but I can’t find any procedure for doing that. Thank you! A Fellow Writer & Tech Geek.”
Thank you so much for the compliment. First, bravo on checking your Sent items to make sure that the messages weren’t actually coming from you. And yes, there is a way to kick all of these unwanted emails into a folder where they won’t clog up your inbox.
First, you’ll need to log into your Outlook.com account using a browser and open the inbox.
Click the gear icon on the upper-right side.
Scroll down to the bottom of Quick Settings and choose View all Outlook settings.
Choose Mail and then Rules.
Under Rules, you can create several different kinds of rules that will direct messages to folders.
Click on Add a new rule.
First, name your rule. You can call it anything, I chose Undeliverable spam rule.
Then click in the box under Add a condition.
You’ll get a menu with a lot of choices. For your situation, you might want to choose Subject includes or subject or body includes.
You can add more than one condition.
Then put that troublesome domain in there or even message undeliverable. If you were to go with something like message undeliverable, you’ll probably want to check that folder from time to time to make sure that a legit message didn’t get shuffled in there.
Then choose Add an action.
You could choose to Mark as Junk or Delete.
Or you could choose Move to and select an existing file or create a new one.
Don’t forget to hit Save when you’re done.
