Hello, TIA for any feedback or advice.
I use outlook for email (windows and IOS mobile app) and have always received a large volume of malicious spam/phishing emails. Within the past few days it has ramped up and am now receiving 100+ per day making it nearly unusable. I use this email for all my banking, tax accounts, healthcare accounts, government accounts like hunting/fishing licenses/permits and I like my email address so starting a new account is a last resort for me.
I have tried unsubscribe services like unroll.me and Mine, and email spam filters cleanfox and mail washer. They have mostly worked to unsub me from legitimate subscription lists, but for actual spam emails these softwares have not seemed to even detect them. I know that trying to unsubscribe directly often makes things worse with malicious senders anyways. Mailwasher seemed to be the best choice for a free spam filter, but when using it I get errors that it cannot log into my account despite correct credentials. I considered trying incogni but found a reddit post with multiple users saying they received more spam after using the service.
I have been using outlooks built in block and report spam filters consistently for over a year and it seems to be getting worse each day at detecting obvious spam/phishing emails.
Most of the spam filter software I have found on google seem to be solutions offered for business accounts, whereas my use is personal. I am not opposed to a paid service, but seeing how many of the free options I have tried that have not worked, I would like to know that if I pay for something there is atleast a higher chance of it working than not.
Sorry for the long explanation. I just wanted to give a background on things I have already tried and the results.
If anyone has any recommendations that are are somewhat reputable and available to non business users for filtering and preventing spam emails I would greatly appreciate it.
Update:
For anyone who finds this when searching the same problem: Got mailwasher working and solved the problem. The reason the app couldn’t log into my outlook account is because outlook requires two factor authentication, and the app is not set up to do that so it just kept failing over and over to log in. Look up how to set a “one time use app password” in outlook and use this password to log in, then boom, no more spam. It seems so obvious but i couldnt find this mentioned anywhere in mailwashers help section, and it took over an hour of troubleshooting online before I found this as a suggested solution. Thats why I came back to make this update as im sure this is a common issue with this software.