Report abuse, phishing, or spam in Outlook.com

Here’s how to report abuse, phishing, and junk email sent to or coming from Outlook mail accounts. These steps also work for hotmail.com, msn.com, and live.com email accounts.

To report abuse

Here's how:

  • If you're being threatened, please call your local law enforcement.

  • To report harassment, impersonation, child exploitation, child pornography, etc, received from a Outlook account, send a complaint to abuse@Outlook.com with all the pertaining information.

  • To report abuse received from a non-Outlook account, contact abuse@xxxxxx.xxx , where xxxxxx.xxx is the part of the sender's email address after the "@" symbol. For example, if the abusive email came from someone@mymailmessages.com, report it to abuse@mymailmessages.com. You can also go to http://abuse.net to identify the correct abuse reporting address.

Report phishing, junk email, or unsolicited email

By reporting phishing, junk email, or unsolicited email, you can help us thwart spammers. Here's how:

If it's being sent to your Outlook account

In Outlook, click the arrow next to Junk and select:

  • Junk for routine junk email.

  • Phishing scam for email that is trying to trick you into giving out sensitive personal information like passwords, bank accounts, or your Social Security number.

  • My friend's been hacked if you suddenly start getting junk email or phishing from a sender you would normally trust.

If it's being sent to an account of yours other than Outlook

If you get unwanted email from a Outlook.com address, click the "Report Spam" button in your email program. Outlook automatically receives these reports from the following ISPs and anti-spam providers:

  • Yahoo!

  • Gmail

  • AOL

  • Comcast

  • RoadRunner

  • Outblaze

  • SpamCop

  • Signal-Spam

  • Verizon

  • Nortel

Several other ISPs have set up their "Report Spam" button to point directly to abuse@Outlook.com.

Regardless of the email service you're using, you can always report phishing, junk email, or unsolicited email you received from a Outlook account by sending an email to report_spam@Outlook.com with the junk message as an attachment. If you don't attach the junk email, our ability to take action against the sending account will be severely impacted.

We ask for a full copy of the email so that we have conclusive evidence showing from which Outlook account the junk email was sent. It is possible that the email address was spoofed, and we don't want to mistakenly close a non-spamming account.

Coming from Hotmail?

Welcome to Outlook.com! For more info about your upgrade, see our FAQ.


Go to Outlook.com

Other resources

Need more help?
Ask your question in the community forums

Have ideas for Outlook.com?
Give us feedback

Can't get to Outlook.com?
Check service status

Think someone hacked your account?
Hacked account