Hotmail, the popular web-based email service of Microsoft, is getting better at fighting graymail with a set of features that Microsoft has introduced. The company claims to have conquered graymail over 100 million times.
For all the talk about the lack of innovation in Hotmail, the web-based email of Microsoft, it seems that the features that are currently available for users are in-fact quite useful. One month after the Windows Live team ushered a set of new features to combat graymail – newsletters, daily deals online service notifications – users are really using these news tools to keep their inboxes clean.
“It’s been just two months since we finished the deployment of our most recent major release, and we’ve already seen millions of people use these tools to quickly take control of their own inbox.” writes Dick Craddock in the Windows Live blog website.
Users are able to keep their inboxes clean with the set of new features. Dick also talks about some of the feature that are now available such as the Schedule Cleanup, a tool that allows users to automatically manage bulk mail. Users are able to set up and have their inboxes cleaned up at a specified time. And if you want to delete one message or a group of message that are related to one sender, sweep is the answer. With sweep, another feature that is now available with Hotmail, users are able to delete “unwanted graymail quickly and easily, and can even automatically set up rules for managing new mail as it arrives.” Users can also organize the inboxes using categories, a feature that is akin to the label feature in Gmail.
According to the blog, customers have performed over 100 million actions using the new features with most users using the sweep actions for cleaning up their inboxes, setting up a rule to move email under a chosen category, and scheduling a clean up to delete email after a given period of time. According to Microsoft numbers:
• You’re using Sweep to get unwanted email out of your inbox: 90% of Sweep actions are “Delete all from this sender.”
• You’re letting Sweep set up rules automatically: When you use Sweep to move mail from a given sender into a folder, you let Sweep automatically set up a rule 60% of the time. That means Sweep keeps working for you as you get new email, even when you are away from your inbox.
• You’re using Schedule Cleanup to keep only the most recent newsletter or deal: 65% of Schedule Cleanup actions are “Only keep the latest message from this sender.”
For people that are receiving hundreds of emails every day, these features can be very useful at helping them keep their inboxes clean, and this can be an automatic process when the proper rule is set up. With the set of new features, and the recent news that Hotmail in ranked as number one in fighting spam, Hotmail is becoming a good choice for web-based email service.