Hotmail Just Got Even Smarter

The largest web-based mail service in the world unclutters your email with remarkably efficient spam filtering and intuitively intelligent graymail management.

Kuala Lumpur, 9 MAY 2012 – Last October, Hotmail – the largest web-based email service in the world with a user base of over 360 million globally, celebrated its 15th anniversary and experienced a complete facelift, causing many to fall in love with it all over again. Now, Hotmail gets even smarter with remarkably efficient spam filtering and intuitively intelligent graymail management.

Graymail, what?

Hotmail estimates that in 2012, the average email inbox will receive 14,600 emails. By 2015, that number will grow to 15,300 emails in a year. The reason for such a rapid rise in number of received emails is due the newsletters and notifications we sign up for, i.e. promotions from our favourite stores, social updates, newsletters from our kids’ schools and many more. Over time, as we keep on signing for more newsletters and notifications, these messages quickly start cluttering our inbox.

According to Barrie Ooi, Head of Windows Live, Microsoft Asia Pacific, 50% of all emails received today are made up of newsletters and notifications that have increased by a whopping 300% in 2011 alone.

“Only 14% of emails in our inboxes are true people-to-people communications and astonishingly, spam takes up only 3% of space in an average inbox. Our inboxes are quickly becoming a depository of newsletters and notifications that we want but for the most part, we don’t have time to read and it fast become irrelevant, turning into clutter that makes it hard to find emails we need. These solicited emails – emails that we willingly subscribe to but which are taking up a large chunk of our inbox space is called “graymail” and today, up to 80% of all email sitting in an average inbox is graymail,” he said.

Hotmail: The Smarter Email

Making sense of email is Hotmail’s main focus, which is why Hotmail has added a special category for newsletters. Whether the user has signed up to receive a weekly communication on fashion, travel or shopping deals, Hotmail is 95% accurate in filtering the newsletter emails into a dedicated folder. This process of identification improves as the user builds on this feature by categorizing or un-categorizing his/her emails – enabling them to prioritize what is most relevant. By categorizing, it not only improves the filtering for themselves but for every Hotmail user.

According to a recent survey conducted by Microsoft, users spend 35 minutes each day checking emails and 85% of users check email multiple times a day. With intuitively intelligent features, Hotmail now makes managing graymail easier. In just one minute, users can slice through the graymail clutter, find what they want, and get their email inbox organised. Among these intelligent and innovative tools include:

- Instant Actions and Flags that help organise emails and find the needed information fast.

- Smart Email Management which allows users to setup an inbox that automatically manages their emails, organise them into folders, deleteexpired deals and compile all your e-bills into one folder.

- Alias feature enables you to aggregate all your other email addresses to take advantage of all the amazing Hotmail features.

“We’ve come a long way with Hotmail. Today, Hotmail is better than ever with a vastly improved performance in spam filtering, storage, and mobile access features. The important lessons learnt throughout our journey has helped us improve our service tremendously - with great spam filtering and amazing graymail management, Hotmail is the best email account for today’s email users. You should try it yourself and see how enjoyably easy it is to get your emails organised,” added Ooi.

Finally, for one reason or another, users may wish to stop receiving a newsletter. With Hotmail, it can be done in one step. Users just have to click on “unsubscribe” and Hotmail will do the rest – let the site know to stop mailing them, use Sweep to immediately clean up their mailbox, remove all the old newsletters from that sender, and finally, send any new ones that come into their junk mailbox until the sender takes them off the subscriber list.