We’ve been talking lately about how you can track the source of an email. I’ve already demonstrated how to do it with Gmail, today we’ll look at some of your options for determining if an email is from who it claims to be in Outlook.com. This would also work if you have a Hotmail, MSN, or LiveMail address as long as you’re accessing it through the online web interface. Here’s the Outlook.com inbox. Your color may vary.
Here’s a pretty suspicious email, claiming to offer a big gift-card reward for answering a survey.
At this point, your good instincts have probably warned you away. To flag these items, click the Junk option at the top.
Click on Junk and you’ll see this drop-down menu.
You can mark suspected scam emails as phishing scams.
If you want to investigate further, click the three-dot icon at top right of the message. Choose View from the drop-down menu.
Select View message source.
This window will open.
Scroll down to the very bottom to find the very last received from listed. Scam emails will often go through multiple sources.
Now you can be sure about marking the message as junk or a scam.
One thing I will ask you not to do is to mark something as spam or junk just because you don’t want to receive an email you’ve subscribed to anymore. If you sign up for a company and you think they’re sending too many emails or you’ve just lost interested, please just unsubscribe. There’s probably a place on the bottom of the newsletter or you can go to their site and look for the option. When you mark something as spam, just because you are no longer interested, you can cause a company to be blocked from sending to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of senders.