Hotmail feels that it has won the war against spam, having announced that true spam in users’ inboxes has reduced to under 3% using SmartScreen™ filtering. Now they have turned their attention to graymail, the emails that users may or may not be happy to receive. Graymail includes newsletters that subscribers may have forgotten signing up for or time-limited offers that clog up users’ inboxes long after the deal has expired. They found out that “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”.
For this reason, Hotmail announced on their blog that they will release soon some new features to help users filter out unwanted emails and clean up their inboxes.
Let’s see the most relevant ones.
Newsletter Category
Using SmartscreenTM technology, Hotmail automatically categorize newsletters, removing them from the general inbox. Boasting an initial accuracy rating of 95 percent, Hotmail’s technology will improve as users tailor their preferences. This feature will make it easy for users to ignore unwanted email newsletters. However, it will also allow them to quickly locate relevant information. Provided your emails contain valuable content of interest to your subscribers, Hotmail’s new newsletter category could work to your advantage.
Schedule Cleanup
To prevent users’ inboxes becoming cluttered with old offers and out-of-date deals, Hotmail has announced Schedule Cleanup. This efficient tool can be set to keep only the most recent email from a named sender. Alternatively, old emails can be automatically deleted or moved to a specific folder. Email marketers can be confident that their latest offers will be highly visible.
One-click Unsubscribe
If users unsubscribe from an email, Hotmail will ensure that they are removed from the marketer’s list. Existing emails will be deleted and any future emails from the sender will be categorized as junk mail. This feature will ensure that email marketers’ lists are up-to-date and that emails have a better chance of reaching interested recipients.
Some email marketers are uneasy about the changes, but the news is not all bad. What do you think?