MindComet

Hotmail Revamps Usability Features; Declares War on Newsletters

Hotmail claims that a good 75% of their spam complaints consist of legit email, most of which are newsletters and / or sales offers. Because of this, they are classifying this email as “graymail”. Hotmail recently explained their reasoning behind this on their blog. See their piechart breakdown of what their average user’s inboxes consist of.

So what Hotmail plans on doing is creating a “Newsletter” category, which emails will filter into automatically. How do they determine which emails are newsletters exactly? They plan on using their “Smartscreen” technology, which they claim to have a 95% success rate.

This may be a little troublesome for us email marketers. I have a feeling open rates for Hotmail users will drop briefly, but only until Hotmail users get used to the new automatic filtration process.

Along with their newsletter filtering process, they’re also unveiling a new unsubscribe process which is independent from the CAN-SPAM compliant links within emails. See the screenshot below for what users will see:

Another cool feature they’ve announced is Sweep, which is a part of Scheduled Cleanup. This feature basically removes all previous marketing messages from a specific sender, only leaving the most recent email in your inbox. The rest are filtered out into a different folder. Check out the video below:

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the new Hotmail. It’ll be interesting to see if any other major ISPs adopt similar tactics to keep users’ inboxes cleaned up by default. Personally, I think this is a little too intrusive on Hotmail’s part, but I suppose they have their reasons. What do you think?

Read more about their new features on their blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2011

Poll: How Do You Deal With Unwanted Messages?

I’ve always wondered how people handle unwanted marketing messages. Now, keep in mind I’m not singling out SPAM either—these messages are usually taken care of automatically by your ISP— I’m talking about any email that you’ve subscribed to that you don’t have the time for at the moment. Do you delete them? Do you leave them just sitting in your inbox unread (this would drive me absolutely crazy)? Do you mark them as read?

If you’re anything like me, you treat your inbox with a fair amount of respect—not allowing it to get too cluttered or mismanaged at any one point. Personally, I mark all unwanted emails as read, but I’m curious to find out what my readers do when they want to blank out their entire inbox quickly.

I’d assume from the outset that the results will show that most people mark as read or delete unwanted emails. But a part of me wonders just how sophisticated the average person is becoming in terms of their inbox and other sources of information online. It’d be very interesting to see if many people have filters setup for their inbox.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 03, 2011