In a result of trying hard to help customers take back control of their own inbox, Hotmail service added 5 new features to better clear up Graymails, a new term defined by Microsoft itself to those newsletter type of emails that are junk to someone but good to others.
What really characterizes graymail is that the same message that one person thinks is “spam” could be really important to another person. It’s not black and white, hence the name.
In fact, 75% of email identified as spam by our customers actually turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having signed up on a legitimate website. And because of inbox clutter, it’s easy to lose track of the really important messages in your inbox that you want to get back to.
And here are the 5 features that helps to clean up this type of clutter.
Newsletter category
By adding the newsletter to the new Newsletter category in your Hotmail, you are not only helping yourself get better manage of your inbox but also helping improve the intelligence of SmartScreen that powers Hotmail engine to get rid of the spams.
One-click unsubscribe
Yes, you can now unsubscribe any unwanted newsletter right within the Hotmail. Simply click on unsubscribe and Hotmail will do the rest. Basically, any new ones will end up in Junk mail automatically. This is a very welcome feature I have been waiting for.
Schedule cleanup
Because of the nature of the newsletters, most of the time you only want to keep them in a short period of time. With this new introduced Scheduled cleanup, you can:
- Keep only the latest message from a given sender
- Delete messages as they get old (3 days, 10 days, 30 days, or 60 days)
- Move messages to a folder as they get old
Keeping important mail right up front: Flags done right
Flagging is a neat feature a lot people love and can’t live without in Outlook. So it makes a lot sense having it included finally in Hotmail. In fact, Flags in Hotmail are still a category just like Newsletters so you can easily use Sweep or Schedule Cleanup features on them.
Custom categories
Needless to say that creating custom categories is a must-have feature for email organizers. Adding support of Sweep and Schedule Cleanup for them is one step forward that farther helps clean up the inbox.
Obviously, all these new features are all welcomed and will put Hotmail in a better position in the market. Hotmail had a reputation being the hotbed for spammers so I am glad that they finally took the matter seriously to give the hard time for these bad guys. But we will see how well it runs when comparing with its major competitor, Gmail. For now, I am going to start using my Hotmail account again when signing up the newsletters. By the way, I like newsletter.
