In November last year, Microsoft had rolled out ‘Clutter’ to Office 365 business customers. Clutter was designed to help users focus on the most important messages in their Inbox. It used machine learning to de-clutter the email by moving lower priority messages out of the way and into a new Clutter folder. Which meant Clutter removed distractions so users could focus on what mattered to them the most.
Clutter was today moving over 1 million emails per day, saving users 82 minutes per month on average. Going by the experience, Microsoft has now announced Clutter would be turned on by default for all from June this year. Plus, there is a new set of administrative controls for users.
According to a post on Microsoft Office blog, there will be an option for administrators to turn Clutter off using the PowerShell cmdlet after the mailbox was created. Thus, users will remain in control & can elect to disable the Clutter feature when they choose, through the ‘Options page’ in Outlook on the Web, Outlook 2016 Preview, or through a special link at the bottom of each notification. The latter is something that every user will receive per week & up to one message per day when new message types are moved to Clutter, i.e. the first time a message from given distribution list is moved.
So how does Clutter work?
Here’s the official explanation: Clutter learns from your actions to determine the messages you are likely to ignore. As less important messages arrive, they are automatically moved to the Clutter folder. Clutter does this by leveraging Office Graph’s sophisticated machine learning techniques to determine which messages are Clutter. It gets smarter over time, learning from your prior actions with similar messages, and assessing things like the type of content and even how you are addressed in the message. The Clutter experience is personalized to each individual and reflects an email experience that adapts to your actions and preferences without you having to do anything. The information Clutter learns from each user’s actions are only applied to that user’s experience and are not shared with anyone else.
Image Credit: Office 365 blog
•Share This•
