Stop Office 365 Emails Going to Junk Error

Are your Office 365 emails going to junk without warning? If you are currently facing this error, it can be quite frustrating. You may miss important emails, and worst of all, due to the auto-delete feature, you may never be able to see the message’s contents.

Recovering misclassified emails is important because Outlook permanently discards all emails 30 days after they are put in the junk folder.

Another reason to fix this problem ASAP is that it adds one more folder to the list of folders you need to check for incoming emails, thereby reducing productivity. Moreover, just opening the junk box doesn’t make it readily apparent; you have to figure out what is genuine from the junk on your own.

You may have to ask the person on the other side to resend the mail without knowing what the mail was about making it quite an awkward conversation. This puts an insincere impression and may not go down well in professional environments.

Don’t worry; we have assembled some proven strategies and tips to help you fix this problem forever. Starting from the most straightforward (but temporary) solution.

Legitimate Microsoft O365 Emails Going to Spam? Put them Back in Inbox

You have to do these steps no matter how recent or old a wrongly sent to spam mail is. Usually when a person puts the email in junk manually Outlook throws in an Undo alert in case the user wants to reverse their decision. However, no such alert appears if the junk detection and subsequent transfers are automatic.

• Step 1: Open Outlook in the Web browser or Desktop.
• Step 2: Go to Junk Emails.
• Step 3: Select all with Ctrl + A or hold Ctrl and choose with your cursor to make a more precise bulk selection of legitimate emails.
• Step 4: Use the Move option in the toolbar to bring these emails back to the inbox or any other folder.

Doing these steps once or twice is no big deal but if a user has to start their work day by rearranging emails in Outlook it is not fun. This begs the question of why is it so. What is causing such an error in the first place.

Why Instances of Office 365 Mail Going to the Junk Folder have Increased All of a Sudden?

The rise of AI has made it easier for spammers and scammers to generate genuine-looking malicious emails. As a result, many email providers (including Microsoft) have made their filtering systems more robust.

In some cases, it has been found to have the unintended effect of flagging even legitimate emails as potential fraud. These false positive emails are then put directly into the junk email folders. Moreover, if all new emails go to junk you won’t even be able to import emails into Outlook client.

These auto filters also trigger if a real email message overuses AI, or follows bad practices like attaching .exe/.zip, filling email with hyperlinks, etc.

Many organizations release productivity guides that recommend the usage of custom rules to segregate incoming messages. Your admin may have implemented such an organization-wide rule at their end.

Additionally, if a user skips over details or makes mistakes while setting up these rules, then instances of emails going to spam are bound to arise.

It is quite possible that users have set up some conditions unknowingly or due to a lack of training. So, when these rules are made active, all external and internal emails start going to the junk folder of the Office 365 Outlook app/client.

Such continuous errors may force organizations to import Outlook contacts to Gmail and begin the transition of the rest of the workloads as well.

So if you don’t want to do that instruct your sender to tone down and change the message structure or use an alternative way of communication like one-to-one encrypted chats.

Change Junk Mail Settings to Stop Legitimate Emails from Going to Spam in Office 365

• Step 1: In Outlook Web/New Desktop click on the gear icon usually at the top right.
• Step 2: Inside the new window go to the mail/email tab and select the Junk Email option.

Note: On the desktop client, you can add multiple email accounts. However, you only be able to tweak the settings if the account has a @outlook, @hotmail, @on.microsoft.com, or a custom domain with an M365 subscription.

• Step 3: See what are the current settings, most probably be set to Strict. If so change it to Standard mode. There is no option to disable new message handling at the user level.
• Step 4: You can keep the security options as it is, scroll down to the Senders section, and switch to Blocked senders and domains.
• Step 5: See if it contains the names of legitimate emails/people whose emails are going straight to the junk section of Outlook. Remove them from the list.
• Optional Step: You may also add these accounts to the Safe Sender list to prevent extra Outlook scrutiny on the messages sent from these accounts.
• Step 6: Hit Save.

Reset Wrong Rules to Stop Emails Going to Junk Outlook 365

The following steps are valid for Outlook web or the New Desktop app.

• Step 1: Log in to Outlook Web
• Step 2: Click on the cog (Settings gear) present at the top right corner to open the Settings window.
• Step 3: Switch to the Mail (Email if you are using the new desktop version) tab and select Rules.

Note: On the Desktop client, you first have to pick an account from the dropdown to see the rules attached to it.

• Step 4: Inside the Rules section click on the 3 horizontal dots you see at the end of a rule.
• Step 5: You can either delete it or Edit and change the tools working.

Don’t forget to Save if you go for the latter option.

Steps Remove Faulty Rules in Outlook Classic

This edition of Outlook is quite diffrent so the steps also change to reflect it.

• Step 1: Open Outlook Classic
• Step 2: Go to File
• Step 3: Click on Rules and Alert
• Step 4: Select a Rule and Hit Delete.
• Step 5: Press Yes on the confirmation box.

If you want you can use the Change Rule mechanism to update the behavior of any existing rule you believe to be causing the emails to go to junk in Outlook.

However, this results in another problem where the same email is kept in two places occupying extra storage. So you might have to increase OneDrive storage to accommodate all the extra data.

As in a cloud platform like Office 365 storage is a premium so not every organization can spend it on duplicate content. So, instead of copying move the mails in the said folders.

If this multi-rule removal/editing approach sounds complex don’t worry we have an alternative solution to the problem.

Professional Alternative to Save Emails Stuck in O365 Outlook Junk

SysTools Office 365 Backup. This tool can pull out the contents from all and if you select the user mode you can get the ability to make folder-level selections as well. Use its Standard mode to just pick the items present in the junk folder and backup it externally for safekeeping.

In this way, you don’t even have to worry about your cloud storage consumption. You can let Outlook autodelete in its usual time frame and make room for new messages in the inbox. the

Here are the steps to use the tool.

Step 1. Launch the tool and select the mode.

Depending on your choice the rest of the steps vary slightly so follow accordingly. If you poses the admin credentials you can continue with admin mode which allows bulk backup. Even in the user-mode admin stills needs to grant app permission from the Azure portal.

 

Conclusion

Now you can easily stop the error of Office 365 emails going to junk on your account. Here in this write-up, we taught the readers the possible causes of this incorrect spam detection and gave you the procedures to remedy it.

As an additional safeguard, we include the steps to use a professional Office 365 email backup kit. Which can assist subscribers of M365 business-level plans to keep an offline copy of email conversations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. When I tap the Office 365 email setting “Mark as not junk,” does it only work for one particular email, or will all other incoming emails from the sender now be considered safe?
A. Marking an email as “Not Junk” usually prevents future emails from the same sender from going to your Junk folder. However, this isn’t always guaranteed. For more reliable filtering, add the sender’s domain to your Safe Senders list.

Q. Can the sender do anything so that Outlook does not mark any of their incoming emails as junk?
A. All of the filtering happens at the receiver end, so the sender has little to no control over the mail once sent. However, if a sender’s mail gets junked by multiple recipients, even those who don’t use any rules or have a safe sender list, then it means that this classification happens because something in the email triggers the auto-filtering. Ask the sender to avoid sending suspicious attachment types, change the wording of the message, etc.

Q. Can I access the Outlook rules management menu/safe sender list on the mobile app?
A. No, neither the Android nor the iOS version has any such capability. Mobile versions of Outlook are more of a view-only profile. You can check your Junk folder and even move wrongly filtered emails back to the Inbox. However, you can’t change the rules or settings.

Q. I don’t see a “Mark as not junk” option in an email that is inside the junk folder. Why so?
A. The “Mark as not junk” option only shows up when Outlook’s internal filtering criteria place the incoming mail in the Junk box automatically. If you pushed an email manually to the Junk folder or it went there because of a custom rule, then you won’t see the option.