Unlike spam, graymail cannot be filtered out that easily, as it is way more versatile. Even more problematic, while email account owners may not want to see most of the graymail on a daily basis, they may want to see some.

Considering that newsletters make up the biggest part of the average user’s mail delivery, Microsoft decided to tackle the problem from that angle.

The Hotmail team started to create a new newsletter filter that would allow users to filter newsletters automatically. When you now open Hotmail, you see the new newsletters filter displayed in the top filtering row. A social updates, contacts and groups filter is available as well.

A click on newsletters displays only mail that Hotmail’s SmartScreen filter has classified as such. According to Microosft, about 97% of all newsletters get identified correctly by the machine. Hotmail users can change email classifications, which may be helpful when emails get classified as newsletters when they are not, or when newsletters do not get recognized as such. These user actions help to improve the filtering further.

The main question is this: How helpful is the new newsletter filter? Newsletters are still displayed in the inbox which means that they will crowd your inbox as they did before. The only real advantage that I see is that you now have faster access to newsletters. This can be helpful in determining which newsletters to keep and which to unsubscribe to. An automatic option to hide newsletters from appearing in the inbox does not seem to be available at this point in time. You can still configure email filters though to move newsletters to a new folder automatically, but that option was available before the update as well.

Email On Acid is such a email marketing service. Users can use it to simulate sending out and receiving emails in its interface. The major benefit of this service is that the email marketer (or webmaster who is sending out newsletters) can fully test the newsletter in various email clients including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail without leaving the website once.

The marketing emails can be added as urls or pasted with their html code. Email on Acid will then parse the email and display a tabbed interface that is displaying the email in the various email clients and services.

HTML emails are displayed by default. It is possible to switch to text mode which simulates the email in clients that do not support html or have html emails disabled. The email marketing service will also perform a code analysis of the html code. Code that is not supported by html emails is displayed in red which can be used to quickly fix html emails before they are send out.

Users who want to make use of Email On Acid need to create a free account at the website.

via Instant Fundas

Another new service was introduced only a few days later. This new service allows Gmail users to automatically unsubscribe from email newsletters. All that needs to be done is to either report the email as spam which will bring up the unsubscription option or to click on the Show Details link in the top right corner and to click on the appearing Unsubscribe from this sender link (if it does not appear it means the newsletter cannot be unsubscribed from automatically).

This sounds – in theory – like a good new feature but there are a few limitations currently in place.

The unsubscribing option is only available for some legit newsletter providers. This is understandable as it would not make sense to unsubscribe a user from a spam newsletter as it is likely that the user did not signup for that newsletter in first place and that the cancellation request would result in more spam than in less because of the verification of the email address.

Not all legit newsletter providers are supported as well at this point. The Gmail blog gives some information on how to prepare a newsletter for the automatic unsubscription. It is definitely a welcome feature that needs broader support to become effective for the majority of users.