This post sponsored by Outlook.com:
Go and look at your inbox right now. Go on, I’ll wait. Done? Good. For the majority of you, over 80% of the email you receive is something called graymail. It’s not spam, but it’s also not higher priority messages from friends, family or colleagues that you’re more likely to read and respond to. Newsletters, social updates and daily deals are all examples of graymail and left unattended they can take over your inbox pretty quickly.
Now here’s a little secret; Microsoft didn’t entirely build the recently released Outlook.com preview from scratch. Under the hood, Microsoft took the best tools and features originally developed for Hotmail – such as those designed to tackle graymail – and incorporated them into the new service.
If you’re someone that likes to file your email away once you’re done with it, Outlook.com has a great tool called Sweep that lets you select a single message from a sender (or multiple messages from multiple senders) and with two clicks “sweep” the messages out of you inbox and into a folder. If you like to delete your read (or unwanted) mail then you can use this feature to sweep messages straight to the trash can. You can even set these actions up as rules that run automatically when messages from certain senders are received.
And that 24-hour-only-daily-deal from November 2011 probably isn’t worth keeping. Use Schedule Cleanup to setup a rule that only keeps the most recent message from 24-hour-only daily deal sites. For more info or to sign up for your account visit www.outlookpreview.com