Tools to fight graymail enjoy increased usage worldwide

Feb 22, 2012 10:32 GMT  ·  By

In fall last year, Microsoft announced a series of new features and tools aimed at reducing the amount of graymail that Hotmail users have to fight against every day.

Things have advanced greatly in the meantime, and Hotmail users report that they managed to conquer graymail over 100 million times through features like Sweep and Schedule Cleanup.

For those out of the loop, we should note that graymail includes newsletters, daily deals, and notifications, messages that sometime account for more than 50 percent of a person’s email.

While sorting this kind of email takes time, Hotmail promises a simple and easy solution for the matter, including the newsletter category meant to automatically identify most newsletters and to put them in a single place.

Additionally, Hotmail now features Schedule Cleanup, along with Sweep and the option to set Categories to have email sorted out the way users want.

All these have proved highly effective in keeping users’ inboxes clean of graymail, Microsoft notes:

- Since November 1, 2011, more than 100 million graymail actions have been performed (this includes Sweep, Schedule Cleanup and Categorization actions) - 90 percent of Sweeps are “delete all from” actions, which shows that users are choosing to delete their unwanted graymail (instead of moving it to another folder in order to keep for later) - 65 percent of Schedule Cleanup actions are “keep latest message from sender” rules, which indicates that users are clearing out expired messages and setting up rules to ensure this happens automatically - 60 percent of “move all from” Sweeps result in a rule creation, signifying that more and more, users are looking to automate the graymail actions they perform in their inbox - Sweep usage is growing by 11 percent each month - Schedule Cleanup usage has grown by 70 percent in the past three months

These features are meant to enable users regain control of their inbox in just 60 seconds, just as Microsoft is teasing in the video embedded below.

“More and more people are using Hotmail’s innovative tools to fight their own war on graymail, and we hope you’ll give these tools a try yourself. We’d love to hear about your own experience using Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, categories, and the rest,” Dick Craddock, group program manager, Hotmail, explains.