Blocking Microsoft from sending mails within Office 365 Exchange

Question

I am receiving a lot of (semi legit) spam mails from Microsoft:

[email protected] - Weekly digest: Microsoft service updates

Although it says "Weekly", I'm receiving those mails almost daily, sometimes multiple per day.

I have opted out from ALL mails I could possibly receive from Microsoft but poor american privacy regulations and commonly known Microsoft ignorance defy and send me the mails anyways.

They even ignore when I hit the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the mail.

I verifed the receipient is the same at all conditions.

My question is:

If I setup Exchange to reject sender "[email protected]" - is there any downside? Like, not receiving the important mails, like password reset, token confirmation, ...

Answer 1

Not an answer on the blocking part but Microsoft is occasionally re-enabling service messages that have been disabled in the past (I noticed Apple, Google and Facebook having the same illegal approach from time to time).

They give a damn about privacy and there is no static solution.

I found out besides the two pages

https://portal.office.com/account/#personalinfo -> Contact Preferences

https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter

There is one tick at the second page on the very bottom that says:

We may occasionally notify you about important updates that aren't covered by these settings.

It has another few ticks that need to be deactivated for MS to hopefully stop sending spam.

Answer 2

I just added a filter rules to

• move those mails to a separate folder
• and set the folder to delete emails older then 3 months.

This way, in case s.th. important comes in I have enough time to check.

Although essentially I "prefer" to do destroy the evil at it's root (see Daniel's answer) I find the filter solution to be implemented much quicker and to be more resilient if MS decides to change the check marks etc.

And it's easy to add filter rules for other senders or attributes.