I don't know why I expected anything else from them, but... MS support strikes again. Although, I suspect it's not entirely support fault here. But anyway, I am moving away from MS services, which includes their mail (changing to Proton, which have some things to iron out with their support, too, but I am still looking at how it will go). I still have to go through a lot of websites to update my email to an alias (in most cases), but I thought I can start forwarding emails right now, just keep their copies in Outlook itself, for a few cases, where I may need to answer from that email.
If only it was that easy.
The problem is with junk. Or rather junk filtering. Junk/spam mail is generally treated a bit differently by most mail providers, which makes sense, but when you enable forwarding of the emails you, it's either that "difference" is removed or you get an option to forward spam mails, as well. Which makes sense, if are enabling global forwarding, since that implies you are not going to visit this service often, if ever.
Not with Microsoft, though. I guess they are like Apple now, thinking that they know better than their users. But forwarding does not work on junk mails. Which by itself may be not sound as that much of a problem, except... Within a month after my subscription expired I started getting lots of junk mail in general, and for some reason almost 90% of legitimate emails were marked as junk, too. Ironically, some were from Microsoft itself. Blocked senders were also still getting through into junk folder, probably because junk recognition was done before blocked sender checks.
But again, sounds simple to remediate, right? Go to settings and disable the filtering, right? Even an article on Microsoft side says this:
Yeah, except, this option is not available on outlook.com:
But maybe it's because article is not really for outlook.com, because maybe it's not really considered as OWA, but some other separate product. It's not really clear. Search through the net also did not yield any useful results, and it looked like people are generally getting same problems as me. So I went to support. Had to use the live chat from outlook.com (which did not even sign me in in Edge, so had to use Chrome).
Full chat log is below, but in short, I had 2 people, both suggested using the option, that's not there. There was suggestion to use desktop version (from MS Store), but, surprise-surprise, it's same thing but in a different window, so it also does not have that option. There was some... Implying, that maybe it's not available because I am not a subscriber, too. And ping-pong between the 2 teams, when the 2nd person sent to the first person, that sent me to the 2nd person in the first place, because 1st one decided that the issue is no longer with outlook.com but with an app. They also do not have an escalation process. Unless it's a process where they want to explain something to me. But I obviously do not need an explanation, I need a solution. Especially, since I am pretty sure, that option to disable filtering previously was there.
I think this is done intentionally, though. Simply to force people to use the service whether they want to or not. Because right now, I can't switch from this service even when I change email on all the websites, because Outlook can still consider legitimate email from Microsoft as junk, and I can't change the email for some of the MS service either way. Perfect👍
