How to stop Hotmail from marking email as spam

For Windows Live Hotmail email addresses, Outlook Mail, which provides access to your Hotmail mail, does a good job of filtering unwanted emails into the spam folder. However, it can also assume that normal non-spam emails are junk and move them to the spam folder as well.

If Hotmail emails are being sent to the spam folder unintentionally, or if you want to be sure that future emails will never be marked as spam, you can add specific email addresses to the Safe Shippers Listing. This way, Hotmail will never consider email from this sender as spam.

You can also tell Outlook.com to only accept email from known senders.

Prevent unsolicited email from being sent from Hotmail

To specify which addresses Hotmail should never send spam email from, go to Safe Shippers and enter the email addresses in the list.

At the top right of Outlook.com, click the Settings gear icon.

Click on Show all Outlook settings below in the context menu.

Go to E-mail > spam.

Enter the sender’s email address or domain in the text box Safe Shippers from the region.

Click on Add to.

Click on To protect at the top of the page.

To enter a domain so that no email from that domain is ever marked as spam, enter just the body (not the “@” sign). For example, you can type gmail.com to unblock all Gmail messages.

You can remove email addresses and domains from the Safe Senders List by selecting them and clicking the “Trash” button. This doesn’t necessarily force emails from these senders to go to the spam folder, rather it returns them to normal email status where they may or may not go to the spam folder, depending on how Outlook.com looks interpret the message.

Tips for using the Safe Senders List

Consider the email addresses you enter in the Safe Senders List. For example, it’s probably perfectly safe to let all emails from Gmail.com go through your inbox, but if you’re filling your safe senders list with too many “unofficial” domains, such as foreign domains or domains you’ve never heard of, fill, you can expect your inbox to also be filled with junk mail.

Jane_Kelly/Getty Images

If you want to add a mailing list to your safe senders list, that may not work, as the mailing list is probably not sent directly to you, but to some sort of distribution list that forwards the email to you. In this case, the Safe Senders List may not work to keep emails out of the spam folder. In this case, add the domain or email address to the mailing list Safe Mailing Lists located just below the Safe Senders List.