Stronger identity verification and accountability for email spam

Question

Stronger identity verification and accountability for email spam

Danny I 20

Dear Microsoft Outlook Team,

I would like to propose a stronger approach to preventing spam across Outlook.com and Hotmail.

I receive approximately 100 spam emails per day in my Hotmail account. Although Outlook correctly moves many of these messages into the Junk Email folder, legitimate messages occasionally end up there as well. Consequently, I still have to review the folder regularly to ensure I do not miss important correspondence.

I believe the problem requires more than increasingly sophisticated spam filters. Email providers should also consider how to make persistent abuse more difficult and the people responsible for it more accountable.

My proposal has three main elements:

Stronger sender verification: Consider requiring additional verification for accounts that exhibit suspicious bulk sending behaviour. Depending on the level of risk, this could involve verified phone numbers or other appropriate identity checks.

A graduated trust system: New accounts and accounts exhibiting suspicious behaviour could face stricter sending limits until they establish a trustworthy history. Verified, reputable senders could benefit from higher limits.

Effective investigation and enforcement: Give recipients a straightforward way to report abusive senders. Repeated, substantiated violations should trigger progressively stronger measures, including account suspension and, where appropriate, referral to law enforcement.

I recognise that mandatory government ID verification for every email user would create privacy concerns, exclude some legitimate users, and potentially push spammers towards stolen identities or compromised accounts. Therefore, I believe a risk based approach would be a more practical starting point.

The broader objective is to make email abuse significantly more expensive and difficult while preserving privacy and accessibility for legitimate users.

I would appreciate it if you could forward this proposal to the team responsible for Outlook.com's anti abuse systems and product development.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

0 additional answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Hi @Danny I

Thank you for taking the time to share such a thoughtful and detailed proposal. I understand how frustrating it must be to receive such a large volume of spam every day, especially when legitimate messages may also be placed in the Junk Email folder and require additional checking.

Your suggestions regarding risk-based sender verification, graduated sending limits, and stronger enforcement against repeat offenders are valuable. You also raise an important point about balancing accountability with users’ privacy and accessibility.

Please note that this is a user-to-user support forum. Community moderators and contributors do not have access to Outlook.com’s internal anti-abuse systems and cannot directly forward product proposals to the development team. To ensure your suggestion reaches the appropriate Microsoft team, I recommend submitting it through Microsoft’s official feedback channel within Outlook.com.

In the meantime, please continue marking unwanted messages as Junk or Phishing, rather than only deleting them. These reports provide signals that can help Microsoft improve its spam-detection and anti-abuse systems.

Thank you again for sharing your constructive feedback.

If the answer is helpful, please click "Yes". If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.