Power users are bound to be happy with the enhancements

Oct 4, 2011 10:35 GMT  ·  By

Five new Windows Live Hotmail tools are currently rolling out to users worldwide, a process that will last a few weeks, and power users are bound to be happy with the enhancements.

It’s all about increasing the level of control that customers have over their inbox, to summarize the focus of Hotmail’s latest updates.

According to Dick Craddock - group program manager, Hotmail, the contents of an average inbox are quite diversified, and actual emails make up just some 14%, with newsletters and deals taking up as much as 50%, social updates 17%, various notifications 9%, shopping 6% and even some actual spam, about 2%.

The new newsletter category was introduced especially to help users deal with what the software giant calls graymail.

“We use the same SmartScreen technology that helps us fight spam – a machine learning engine that gets better over time,” Craddock said.

“Right out of the gate, we’re 95% accurate with the mail we categorize as newsletters, and this will only get better as you help us build the feature by categorizing or un-categorizing your own mail. In fact, every time you categorize an email as a newsletter, you help make our filtering better for yourself and every other customer.”

But at the same time, the Redmond company is streamlining the process of unsubscribing to newsletters. No longer will users need to fight with the source themselves, they can just turn to the new one-click unsubscribe feature in Hotmail, and the email service will deal with the rest.

Categories as always nice, but through the latest refresh Hotmail is enabling customers to create custom categories.

“You can quickly create a new category and apply that category to all related messages at the same time – no searching for mail, no complex rules to create. You can categorize messages right in the message list with the new categories column. And categories show up as QuickViews right next to folders, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for,” Craddock added.

More importantly, Hotmail makes it extremely easy to move all messages from a specific source or in a certain category to an email folder, with the Categories, Sweep, and Schedule Cleanup folders working together.

And speaking of Scheduled Cleanup, this is another new Hotmail feature. It’s designed to remove all emails from a sender, with the exception of just the latest ones, that users might want to keep.

The last tool that will be available to Hotmail users involves a flagging mechanism capable of keeping important email at the top of the inbox, even if new messages come in.

‘Now when you flag a message, it gets “pinned” to the top of your inbox and stays there, even as new email comes in. This means it is easy to keep track of your most important messages, right up front, all the time. What’s more, you can even set up rules to automatically flag incoming mail from certain senders, so that your most important mail is always right there at the top of your inbox,” Craddock explained.

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