Report email as Phishing in Outlook

This guide is meant to help you as a user in Outlook to report an email as Phishing when a suspicious email enters your inbox.

Background

Even though there are many filters and security measures to block malicious actors that are coming through email, some manage to disguise themselves as proper emails and make it through to your inbox.

Since we cannot block all incoming emails to your inbox there has to be some slack to allow proper emails to come through. To prevent spam and other malicious emails many extra pieces of information are being sent with every email. These are invisible to the user but will or will not grant you access to either receive or send emails. Some malicious actors do manage to replicate these methods making them very hard to filter out.

Newer filters and so-called scanners will check the contents of an email and look for known phrases or known bad links. This works great but not 100%.

This is where you come into the picture. By reporting an email that you deem malicious, you can help in this case Microsoft become better at spotting these spam emails.

By reporting the email as phishing you can alert Microsoft that this is unwanted and should have been blocked. Here is how to do it.

Reporting as Phishing in New Outlook

If you are using the new version of Outlook the steps are as follows.

Open

After you have selected an email that you believe is phishing. Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. Go down the list to “Report” and then “Report phishing”. The email will then be deleted.

Reporting as Phishing in old Outlook

If you are using the old Outlook app. Here is how to report an email as phishing. (Note: The old Outlook application will have an EoL (end of life) by the end of 2024.)

Open

In the Home tab of Outlook. Click “Report Message” and a dropdown menu will appear. Here you click “Phishing”