Microsoft revamps Hotmail

SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has overhauled Hotmail in an update that “declares war on graymail”.

Microsoft defines ‘graymail’ as email that is reported as spam but is actually legitimate content, such as newsletters or notifications that users have signed up to receive. The firm plans to address this problem by rolling out various tools over the coming weeks.

Graymail apparently accounts for 75 per cent of the emails that users reported as being spam.

Microsoft said in its blog, “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.”

“We’re excited to announce five powerful tools to help you take control of your inbox, get rid of graymail, and keep track of the email that’s important to you.”

For starters is newsletter filtering that allows users to highlight and delete newsletters or unsubscribe from them from within Hotmail. Custom categories will mean emails can be, er, categorised rather than sent to separate folders.

Further, a scheduled clean-up feature will keep your Hotmail inbox tidy by deleting old emails or moving them to a folder automatically based upon a user defined setting. For example, it can delete all messages from a certain sender except for the most recent.

A small change is that flagged emails get pinned to the top of the inbox and stay put even when new email arrives. Emails from selected senders can be set to be automatically flagged when they arrive.

Lastly are instant actions that give users a selection of options, such as delete or flag, when the mouse is hovered over an email.

If this doesn’t sound like enough of a re-jig to get Hotmail up to speed with, say, Gmail, Microsoft said that it is “still just getting started”, and added, “We’ll have more on these features and others as they roll out in the coming weeks.”

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