Obscure Problems and Gotchas

Before you start reading

1. This was written on 2026-03-29
2. At the time of writing this there was no solution. This is being written to raise awareness and to shame Microsoft.

What’s that now?

Yep you read that right. If you use OneDrive there is a chance you will receive unsolicited shares from completely random strangers. Forget about the fact that this is porn and it’s probably very much being shared with minors (let that sink in) this is just one more cyber security attack vector into your life that you didn’t ask for. You have to assume that if some rando is sending you material like this it’s to entice you into opening it so you can click on seemingly innocuous links so you can look at some pornographic material; when in reality it’s very likely it is a scheme to infect your device, a webstore scam, or other form of scammery.

Microsoft is being negligent

Microsoft is absolutely responsible for resolving this problem and they have zero deniability of saying, “We don’t have mechanisms in place to solve this problem.” because they do. They offer these safety mechanisms exclusively to their business users. In fact the instructions are located here: https://learn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off and they enable you to completely shut off external sharing.

Now I know you might be compelled to say, “Oh, but business users are paying for these services, so of course they get this kind of tooling.” Let me stop you right there, I am also a paying user of Office 365, and I have been for years. I purposely evaluated Google Drive and OneDrive for over a year to see who I am going to be trusting too much with my personal information. Long story short I went over to Office 365 so I didn’t have to keep worrying about getting new copies of office since my wife and I are both heavy Outlook, Office, and Excel users. These necessary applications combined with the desire to automatically backup important files, OneDrive just made the most sense. My point is that “businesses are paying customers argument” won’t hold water.

What’s the big deal though?

Putting aside people who aren’t adults like me, like underage children, and non-computer savvy elderly people, what’s the big deal? So you see a couple of nekked people for free? So what?

My wife is being spammed with tens to almost a hundred shares per week! Now I would agree, that this wouldn’t be a big deal if there was a way to select all and report as spam, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom doesn’t even have this option available!

Microsoft’s lackluster response is that she should one by one report the content and then delete it. That sounds like a job. Since we both already work full-time jobs, I won’t be doing this. My wife however, unfortunately has no choice since she relies on the share feature to actually collaborate with other people besides me.

It is a humongous pet peeve of mine when organizations, who I pay for a service, then turn around and tell me to do work for free on their behalf.

Then to add insult to injury, the report spam action usually ends in error. Awesome. I expect nothing more from Microsoft at this point.

Why didn’t you report it instead of writing this article?

Oh I didn’t have to, many other people have been reporting this already since 2025-12-11 here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5657323/how-do-i-stop-other-accounts-from-sharing-files-to

All of these other posters are corroborating what I am saying to a tee and with the same detail.

Examples

Here is an example of what one of the posters has shared and this looks exactly like what my wife has been getting:

Notice those are PDFs, that means they could have embedded malicious code in them besides links to malicious sources.

This is what your shares should look like, especially if you never use it like me:

I have a total of two shares, that’s it. This is not a feature I use and frankly I don’t think random people I don’t know should be allowed to send me ANYTHING.

Since Microsoft clearly DOES have the capability to stop this, they need to get off their lazy asses trying to make AI slop happen and take care of their existing PAYING customers.

The Enshitification of Microsoft

Microsoft has been on a trajectory in only what can be described as a 747 flying straight into the broad side of a mountain. They doing it to themselves and I have complained about this loudly for years. The only thing that saves Microsoft from disaster is the same thing that saves other large corporations from disaster, they have too much goddamned money. Things have slowly been descending into madness since Windows Vista. I don’t understand what Microsoft doesn’t understand.

They decided one day, just like Boeing and Broadcom, “Hey! Fuck our customers.”, and well that’s exactly what they did. Cheap out in every single way imaginable, produce disaster level products, and pat themselves on the backs. The problem is these types of companies have become so entrenched in the world it’s become hard to get rid of them or correct their bad behaviors. This is not successful or an example of “being a cunning business man”, it is shameful, grotesque, and everything wrong with America.

I explained in my comment on that post to Microsoft that they should at the VERY least quickly provide a, “Multi select, and delete all feature, that’s a relatively quick fix.” I also suggested “…get a competent team of developers together with one or two PEs to solve the issue.”

Relevant articles I have written support what I am saying here:

Microsoft is screwing its base again

Goodbye Windows – kind of

The era of low effort AI answers