Have you ever received an email that is clearly spam or a phishing attempt? Not sure what to do with it? In Outlook, you can report these messages to Microsoft to help them improve their anti-spam filters and protect your organization from similar messages.
When you report a message, you are essentially sending it back to Microsoft and saying, “this should have been marked as spam” or “this should have been marked as a phishing email.” Microsoft uses this feedback, along with many other metrics, to improve their spam filtering algorithms.
Reporting a message not only helps Microsoft, but it can also help your organization specifically. If enough people report a particular type of message, Outlook is smart enough to proactively check if anyone else in your organization received that message. If enough people did, Outlook will automatically remove the message from everyone’s inbox.
To report a message as spam or phishing, you can do this on a message that is already in your junk email or in your inbox. Simply select the message and click “Report Message.” From there, you can choose to tag the message as junk or phishing and also send a copy to Microsoft to help with research and email protection technologies.
By reporting messages, you are not only protecting yourself from future spam and phishing attempts, but you are also helping to protect your entire organization. So, the next time you receive a suspicious email, don’t hesitate to report it in Outlook!