Hotmail declares war on graymail

What’s in your inbox?

In the early days of email, most mail in the inbox was from someone you knew, but today’s email is used for much more, and so the inbox is different. More than half of the mail in a typical inbox is newsletters or deals, 17% is social updates, and about 14% is person to person email. The rest represents mail from group distribution lists, shopping receipts and commerce, and true spam.

What is graymail?

The problem with today’s inbox is that it is easy for it to get filled up with mail you don’t want. It could be newsletters you signed up for and forgot about (but keep getting), or it could be newsletters you get when you join a new service (and forgot to uncheck that pesky box that says “send me lots of email!”). Or it could even be updates you get from a social network or website. 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.
Despite the drastic decrease of true spam in the inbox, we found that most customers are still seeing newsletters, product offers, and other clutter. 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. So we decided in our upcoming release to add five new features that help customers take back control of their inbox.

New newsletter category

We’ve talked about categories for a while now – in our last release we delivered automatic categorization of social updates, messages that contain Office documents, messages with photos, and even shipping notifications. We’re now adding a special category for newsletters. We use the same SmartScreen™ technology that helps us fight spam – a machine learning engine that gets better over time. 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.

One-click unsubscribe

Sometimes you don’t want a newsletter, but it’s hard to find out how to stop getting it. Now with Hotmail you can do it all in one step. Click on unsubscribe, and we’ll do the rest – let the site know to stop mailing you, use Sweep to immediately clean up your mail and remove all the old newsletters from that sender, and finally send any new ones that come in to your junk mail until the sender takes you off their list.

Schedule Cleanup

There are other times you want to keep getting the newsletter, but only want to keep the latest copy. This is great for shopping sites or deals where the newsletter is really only useful for the first week and then the offer expires or a new newsletter takes its place. Today, we’re introducing Schedule Cleanup, a new tool, unique to Hotmail, that works behind the scenes to keep your inbox organized. With Schedule 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

Here are some ways to use Schedule Cleanup:

• Keep only the latest event calendar email from your favorite site
• Keep only the latest deal from Groupon or LivingSocial, or any other deal vendor
• Delete your newsletters after 10 days – that way, whether you read them or not, they are never clogging up your inbox
• Automatically archive mail from your financial institutions to a folder after 30 days

Keeping important mail right up front: Flags done right

The war on graymail isn’t just about deleting things or moving them to folders. It’s also about making sure you can find messages quickly, especially messages that are most important to you.
This happens to our customers all the time: they get an important message and want to keep it right up front where they won’t forget it. How do you handle that? A lot of people mark the message unread. But, of course, as new mail comes in, that can get confusing. Some people forward the message to themselves so that it stays at the top of their inbox.
At Hotmail, we think the right way to track important messages is with flags, and our upcoming changes make flags even more powerful. 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.
Of course, flags are a category, just like newsletters or social updates, so you can use Sweep or Schedule Cleanup on flags.

Have different types of email? Create custom categories

While we think these automatic categories work great for most customers, we recognize that some customers want even more control over their inbox, or they like using labels in products like Gmail. So we’re adding support for custom categories, powered by Sweep and Schedule Cleanup, so they are easy to set up and use.
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.

Folders for filers

Now if you’re a filer and use folders, you might be wondering how all of this helps you. Categories, Sweep, and Schedule Cleanup work great for folders. Simply click on a message, click Sweep or Schedule cleanup, and move all messages from that sender (or in a category), including future messages, to a folder. And of course, you have the same ability to create your own folders and sub-folders. But we didn’t stop there – we’ve added advanced folder management tools: nested folder with drag and drop, creating new folders right inline, and a new right-click menu for folders that lets you mark everything in the folder as read, or rename, empty, or even delete the folder.

And we’re still just getting started

Whew! That’s a lot of new features for fighting the war on graymail and keeping track of your important messages. And we’re just getting started. We’ll have more on these features and others as they roll out in the coming weeks. So try out our new tools when they hit your inbox and let us know what you think!
Dick Craddock - Group Program Manager, Hotmail

Ten new reasons to love Hotmail

1. Keep only the latest message from any sender with Schedule cleanup

Today’s inboxes can get cluttered with lots of emails from the same sender, like newsletters or event calendars. Hotmail can automatically manage these messages by keeping only the latest email from a given sender. It’s easy—just select the sender, then choose Schedule cleanup on the Sweep menu, and then select “Only keep the latest message from this sender.” Hotmail will immediately delete all but the latest email from that sender, and each time a new message arrives from this sender, the older message will be deleted.

2. Delete messages as they get old with Schedule cleanup

With other kinds of email, like daily deals and offers, you might want to keep several messages, but only for a few days. Hotmail can automatically clean these up, too, by deleting or moving these messages to a folder after a set amount of time. Just select a set of messages, then choose Schedule cleanup on the Sweep menu, and then select either Delete or Move all messages older than 3, 10, 30, or 60 days. Hotmail will take care of the rest automatically.

3. One-click Unsubscribe

Have you gotten yourself on a mailing list you no longer need? It happens to all of us – you sign up to some web site, and the next thing you know, you’re getting a bunch of newsletters that you don’t really want. With Hotmail, unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters has never been easier. We’ve combined Unsubscribe with the power of Sweep, so unwanted messages are removed from your inbox instantly and permanently with One-click Unsubscribe. Just select (or open) a newsletter, and then choose Unsubscribe on the Sweep menu. Hotmail takes care of all the details like telling the sender to take you off their list, setting up a rule to block messages from that sender, and even cleaning up your inbox if you want—all  in one easy step.

4. Flags done right

We all get important email that we need to get back to later. Now, Hotmail makes it easy, by letting you instantly flag important messages and pinning those messages to the top of your inbox. Those messages stay pinned even when new email arrives, so you never lose track of that email gift card, your flight itinerary, or other important messages. You can even set up rules to automatically flag messages from specific senders.


Here’s a video showing you how to use flags:

5. PhotoMail and DocMail—improved with preview and inline editing

Millions of people share photos through email. Now, Hotmail gives you a beautiful photo album every time you send photos, and with our new release, you get to see that album as you compose your mail. You can even edit the title of your album right inline and add and remove photos before sending.

6. Send files using SkyDrive

Let’s face it, attachments can be a hassle. If the files are too big, or if you attach too many, you might hit sending limits. Or, even worse, the people to whom you’re sending the files might hit limits with their email system, and never receive what you’re sending. That’s why we built SkyDrive right into Hotmail. Now, whenever you send a file, photo or document, you can choose to have that file stored on SkyDrive instead of sending it as an attachment. Using SkyDrive means that everyone will receive the files without any problems, and you no longer have to worry about attachment limits. It’s so easy to use SkyDrive that you can even make it the default for sending all attachments.

7. Forgotten attachment detector

Speaking of attachments, have you ever sent an email to someone meaning to include a file or photo, but forgot to attach it? Hotmail now includes a new Forgotten Attachment Detector that reminds you to attach a file when there are phrases like “see attachments” in an email with no attachments. We’re still tweaking how it works, but right now our detector will catch about 75% of forgotten attachments.

8. Instant Actions that you can customize

We’ve spent a lot of time studying how people use their inbox, and as part of that, we know that certain actions occur very frequently. We’ve taken several common actions—delete, flag, and mark as read/unread—and made them instantly accessible in just one click with our new Instant Actions. But we went one step further. The new Hotmail lets you customize your own Instant Actions so that your inbox works the way you want. You can set up Instant Actions to categorize messages, sweep messages, mark messages as junk or even move messages to a folder, making things like one-click archive a snap.

9. Folder management

We heard from our customers that they wanted more from our folders and subfolders. That’s why we made sure creating and managing folders is easier than ever before. Now, you can create new folders inline and drag one folder into another to create a nested hierarchy. You can also move messages to a folder using drag and drop. And the new right-click menu gives you fast, easy access to common folder operations:

10. Hotmail for Android phones

If you’re using an Android phone, you can now easily access your Hotmail account with the official Hotmail Android app. The app has full EAS support to sync all of your email, calendar, and contacts. It supports multiple Hotmail accounts on the same device and displays new mail notifications on the Home screen. The app has been downloaded by over two million Android users. It can be installed by visiting the Android Market and searching for Microsoft Hotmail, or just by clicking here. Best of all, it’s free!

Keep the feedback coming – this week, we’re on Twitter

We hope you enjoy the latest release. Let us know what you think—we’d love to hear your feedback. We will be hosting a live Twitter Q&A on the new Hotmail features tomorrow, December 16th, on Twitter from 12:30PM until to 1:30PM, Pacific Time.  Use the hashtag #HotmailQnA in your question and follow us (@Hotmail) to participate in the conversation.
And, as always, thank you for using Hotmail.
Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

Hotmail, already powering over 15 million phones and growing, comes to Kindle Fire

We think it’s critical that our customers can use Hotmail from any device they choose. So, in addition to making Hotmail work great on devices running Windows, we’ll continue to invest in great experiences on other major device platforms. The recent release of iOS5 and our Hotmail application for Android has made it even easier to use Hotmail on those devices, and the result has been over 12 million active Hotmail users on iOS and over 3 million active users of our Android application.

The Hotmail team is happy to announce that our Kindle Fire application for Hotmail is now live in the Kindle store and ready for download for free. The Hotmail Kindle app gives you several advantages over the native Kindle Fire mail application. Whereas the native Kindle application simply downloads your mail via POP3, with the new Hotmail app you can sync all your mail, contacts, folders, and subfolders via the more robust Exchange Active Sync protocol. Because the Kindle Fire uses a different implementation of Android, we needed to make some updates to our previous Hotmail app for Android to ensure it worked well. Now that we’ve finished the work and the app is ready, we’re excited to give customers a great Hotmail experience on the Kindle Fire. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Thanks,
David Law
Director – Hotmail Product Management