The SEO and digital marketing email spam wave, widely affecting businesses, media outlets and website operators, typically consists of templated outreach messages promising search-engine ranking improvements or web-development services.
Email users are recognising Outlook’s more reactive stance, citing consistent enforcement against offending accounts reported to abuse@outlook.com — with 100% of reports resulting in visible confirmed action via email responses.
In contrast, Google’s Gmail service is drawing criticism for inaction, as spam accounts often remain operational despite repeated reports via its built-in tool.
Outlook.com Enforcement Pushes Back Against SEO Spam Epidemic
The current surge of SEO and digital marketing spam — characterised by generic outreach templates promising improved Google rankings and low-cost web services — has inundated personal and business inboxes across industries for years.
Commonly targeted recipients include small businesses, media organisations, and website operators.
A commonly reported example reads:
“Hi, I hope you’re doing well. I would like to discuss a business SEO. We can get your website on the front page of Google. Let me know if you are interested, then I can send you our Full SEO Packages with plan, activities, and Pricelist.”
Industry observers say the campaigns are usually generated through automated mailing tools operating at massive scale, often using newly created disposable accounts to send thousands of unsolicited emails to millions of website owners every week.
Outlook enforcement focuses on mitigating sender accounts
Testing conducted across multiple reporting cycles shows that Microsoft is taking sender-level enforcement action with Outlook. com-hosted accounts identified in the campaigns are being suspended after verified abuse reports were submitted.
The approach effectively disables the infrastructure behind the spam operation, preventing repeat campaigns from the same accounts and reducing ongoing nuisance traffic.
Industry analysts note that this form of enforcement — disabling abusive accounts rather than merely delivering messages to spam folders as Gmail.com frequently does — is increasingly viewed as the most effective strategy for curbing mass solicitation campaigns.
Gmail filtering continues, but accounts often remain active
In contrast, observers also report that similar SEO-marketing spam (generally from the same entities) originating from Gmail.com accounts frequently continues to be delivered directly to inboxes— even after being reported through Gmail’s in-platform reporting tools.
Because sender accounts often remain active, campaign operators are able to continue distributing automated solicitations at scale.
Marketing spam is becoming a dominant nuisance category
Globally, unsolicited marketing outreach — particularly SEO services, lead-generation offers and low-cost web-development solicitations — has become one of the most visible categories of daily inbox spam.
With nearly half (50%) of all global email traffic estimated to be unwanted or abusive, enforcement responsiveness by major providers is becoming a key differentiator in the broader fight against email abuse.
Microsoft’s consistent response to reports targeting SEO-marketing spam campaigns signals a more aggressive enforcement stance, one that security professionals say prioritises account suspension and disruption of spam operations, rather than relying solely on filtering to spam folders to contain the problem.
A key difference highlighted by recent testing is the speed and visibility of enforcement pathways
Outlook.com maintains a monitored abuse@outlook.com reporting address, and users submitting verified complaints about SEO-marketing spam campaigns report near-immediate acknowledgment followed by enforcement action, often resulting in suspension of the sending accounts.
By contrast, Gmail does not seem to publicly enforced an equivalent direct abuse mailbox for manual submissions related to consumer Gmail.com senders, relying instead on in-platform reporting tools that primarily filter future emails into spam folders, with limited visible sender-level disruption.
Our own Investigations show many templated SEO spam campaigns originate from bulk-mail operations in South Asia, particularly India, where “most” low-cost providers rely heavily on unsolicited mass email outreach instead of organic customer acquisition.
Tech Business News concludes that when free email providers actively suspend accounts associated with these campaigns — rather than only filtering their messages to spam folders — it sends a clearer deterrent signal to operators running high-volume marketing spam operations.
Unlike Microsoft’s monitored abuse inbox, Gmail abuse reporting email address for public use appears to not yield any kind of positive response or action to this specific type of spam.
Critics argue the lack of a transparent or actionable reporting pipeline contributes to the platform’s limited enforcement visibility — and offers little deterrence to high-volume spammers.
