Hotmail Gets Newsletter Filter
Did you know that newsletters make up about 50% of the email the average user receives? Microsoft discovered this after analyzing what they called graymail. Graymail in short is all mail that is not spam or personal email. When they looked at graymail they discovered that newsletters and social updates were the two biggest groups which were responsible for 50% and 17% of all inbox email respectively, followed by person to person mail with 14%.
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.
Advertisement
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!