Emails you want to see might end up in Junk Email as Microsoft imposing new standards to ensure emails are legitimate. Microsoft isn’t allowing any way to bypass their new rules for emails you want.
The new standards apply to senders but there are important and less well promoted effects for anyone using Microsoft hosted email, including Outlook.com.
Unverified Email to Junk Email
The stronger requirements for high volume emailing are a good move but Microsoft is adding an unnecessary complication for their paying customers.
Emails from large-scale senders who do not meet the new requirements will have their non-compliant emails dropped into the Junk Email folder, effective 5 May 2025. (at some unknown future date, non-compliant message could be totally rejected.)
That means some messages you want to see may disappear from your Inbox and users will have to remember to look in the Junk Email folder (often forgotten).
This change would be OK, if there was a way for the user to override that and leave the ‘unverified’ email in the Inbox or allow the message to be put into another folder. But it seems Microsoft won’t give customers any choice or control.
Safe Sender is no help
You might think there’s a way around this. After all, Outlook has a ‘Safe Senders’ list to allow emails to the Inbox that might otherwise be treated as spam. Think again.
Adding a sender to the “Safe Senders” list in Outlook won’t make any difference. If an incoming email isn’t compliant with Microsoft’s new standards, it will be moved to “Junk” or deleted regardless of your “Safe Senders” settings.
What about email Rules?
Microsoft has not said if an incoming email rule can redirect a non-compliant / unverified message. If ‘Safe Senders’ isn’t honored then it’s likely Rules won’t work either
If so, that leaves Microsoft customers with no choice but to check their Junk Email folder for messages that that want to see. Not a good outcome for paying customers.
Why is Microsoft doing this?
The changes to add extra checks on mass-mailing domains isn’t just a good thing, it could be argued that Microsoft has waited too long.
However, bypassing the customers options to filter incoming messages (“Safe Senders” and likely “Email Rules”) is just arrogant and lazy.
Microsoft’s actions are arrogant because it assumes that 100% of messages they tag as ‘Unverified’ are truly unwanted and junk/spam.
And lazy because Microsoft is choosing a mail processing method that’s best (cheapest) for Microsoft. Giving customers control of their incoming mail via Safe Senders and Rules would be more complicated (i.e. expensive) for Microsoft to implement. Redmond has chosen the cheaper development option and left paying customers without choice.
Stricter requirements for mass mailings to Microsoft mailboxes
