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Hotmail changes inbox newsletter management

07 October 2011 | Kate Waite

This week Hotmail have announced changes in the way in which they will deal with email categorisation and are declaring war on “graymail”.

Graymail is a term being used to describe emails which people have subscribed to but don’t necessarily want to receive. While many recipients may mark this as spam, for others it is a message that they want to read. Unlike emails offering cheap medication or free money from Nigeria, these emails aren’t spam, despite the fact that 75% of Hotmail users are flagging them as such. The graph below shows a breakdown of what is in the average inbox.


Image credit: The Windows Blog

The main issue that Hotmail are looking to help users with, is that person to person email accounts for only 14% of a typical inbox with more than half the mail received being newsletters or deals. This makes it difficult for people to keep track of important messages they want to receive. To combat this Hotmail are introducing new features to help people manage their emails.

New newsletter categories

As the name implies emails which are identified as newsletters will be now be categorised as such. Previously they introduced new categories, such as social updates, allowing better filtering options for users.

What does this mean for your email newsletters? It is not a bad thing, many users will continue to check mail without filtering by categories and for those who do it may make your mailings easier to find.

One-click unsubscribe

Hotmail are aiming to make things easier to unsubscribe from mailings – with one click you can tell Hotmail to inform the sender you wish to unsubscribe, delete old newsletters and send any future mailings straight to the junk email. Again this isn’t overtly negative as you should be making it easy for somebody to unsubscribe anyway!

If you use unsubscribe exit surveys normally then users won’t get to see this which is one downfall, and of course there is a danger users can get click happy and work through their inbox unsubscribing when normally they wouldn’t have done.

Of course as long your email marketing messages are engaging and of interest then this feature shouldn’t impact too negatively on your list, and may serve to improve your email statistics as a whole, weeding out disinterested recipients and pushing future open and click through rates up.

Schedule Cleanup

Another new feature allows people to keep their inbox more organised by giving users clean up options which include only keeping the latest message from a sender or deleting newsletters after a period of time.  For email marketers sending out regular offers this is a positive thing, making sure your most recent and up-to-date messages are the ones being seen.

You can check out a video of Schedule Cleanup in action along with other new features being introduced by Hotmail on their own blog post.