Emails being tagged

Hi JP,

Thank you for the update and for confirming that you are the administrator.

After looking into this further, it appears that this is the new Promotions tag applied by Microsoft 365 to messages identified as promotional bulk mail. This feature is currently being rolled out, which would explain why the tag appeared suddenly even though you had not made any changes to your existing rules.

At General Availability, the Promotions tag is enabled by default, and there does not appear to be a tenant-wide toggle in the Microsoft 365 or Defender portal for disabling the tag itself. To prevent messages from receiving the tag, Microsoft’s documented method is to create a mail flow rule in the Exchange admin center:

1. Open the Exchange admin center.
2. Go to Mail flow > Rules.
3. Create a new rule and name it, for example, Prevent Promotions tag.
4. Under Apply this rule if, select the intended scope. For example:

• The recipient > is this person to apply it to your mailbox; or
• The sender is located > Outside the organization if you want to cover external messages more broadly.

5. Under Do the following, select Modify the message properties > Set a message header.
6. Enter the following values:

• Header: X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BulkStamping
• Value: 0

7. In the rule settings, make sure Stop processing more rules is not selected.
8. Save and enable the rule, then test it with newly received messages.

I recommend initially limiting the rule to your mailbox or a small test group before applying it more broadly, as preventing bulk classification across the entire organization could also affect legitimate bulk-mail filtering.

If messages are also being moved into a separate Promotions folder, you can stop that behavior by going to the applicable inbound anti-spam policy in the Microsoft Defender portal and turning off Bulk moves enabled. This prevents the automatic move but does not, by itself, remove the Promotions tag.

For further information, you may refer to Bulk email detection and Promotions tagging

Hi JP,

Thank you for sharing your situation.

The Promotions tag may be applied automatically when Microsoft 365 identifies a message as promotional or bulk email. In some organizations, these messages may also be moved to a Promotions folder based on the administrator’s anti-spam policy.

First check Settings > Mail > Rules in Outlook on the web and confirm that no inbox rule is assigning the Promotions category or moving these messages.

For emails that were incorrectly classified, you can also try:

• Right-clicking the message, moving the message from the Promotions folder back to the Inbox.
• Repeating this with a few affected messages so Outlook can learn your preference.

If you are using a work or school account and the tag continues to appear, please contact your Microsoft 365 administrator. There may not be an option for an individual user to disable this classification completely in OWA, because it may be controlled by the organization’s anti-spam policy. Your administrator can review the promotional or bulk email settings and determine whether an exception should be configured.

• In case you do not know who is your IT admin, kindly refer to this article: How do I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support    

I hope this information is helpful. Should you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please feel free to share them in the comment below. I'm very happy to help.  

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