A new beta version rolled out a few months ago with a new look and feel, together with some interface changes. Overall, it’s an improvement with a few quirks, but there’s one thing that really bothers me. They’ve removed the option to mark and report an email as “Phishing scam” if the email is in your inbox folder. This is annoying because I do get sketchy emails sometimes that get passed their spam detection. Especially the ones that look like it’s from Apple or PayPal, which look pretty authentic at first glance. In the old outlook.com, you could mark it as such by going to “Junk > Phishing scam”.

Old outlook.com interface

If you look at the new outlook beta menu, there’s no “Junk”-button anymore. They’ve replaced it with a “Spam”-button, but there’s no submenu with a options to report an email.

New outlook.com beta interface

Where could it be? Perhaps underneath the “…”-button? Nope. Nothing there. So we can’t report emails anymore?

Not here either

Don’t worry. If you really want to report an email as phishing, you need to mark the email as “Spam” first. This puts the email in your “Junk Email” folder. Then go to “Not spam > Phishing” to finally report the email as one. It’s so redundant. And we’re not even talking about the fact that “Phishing” is listed under “Not spam”. That’s even more confusing as I talked about this in an earlier post about the old outlook.com. Why do they have to hide this feature and make it so difficult? It’s not like the top menu has too many buttons or is running out of space. And it’s certainly not because of cross-platform, since outlook.com on mobile has a completely different interface. Then why…….?!?

There it is!