Microsoft Clutter sorts Office 365 email
Connecting state and local government leaders
Government workers with overflowing inboxes may soon see some relief from Microsoft’s “Clutter” email management tool for Office 365 business users.
Government workers with overflowing email inboxes may soon see some relief. Microsoft recently announced the roll out of its “Clutter” email management tool for Office 365 business users.
Clutter uses machine learning and Office Graph to map work relationships, learning which messages are important to the user and which are not. After a learning period, Clutter sends these less wanted emails to a Clutter folder in the user's Outlook email client. It addresses the email that has already passed a user's spam filter.
According to Microsoft, The Clutter experience is personalized for each user and automatically reflects an email experience based on an individual’s actions and preferences. The information Clutter learns from each user’s actions are only applied to that user’s experience and are not shared with anyone else.
The Clutter feature is described in Microsoft's announcement as capable of getting "smarter" over time, learning from prior actions with similar messages and assessing the type of content and even the message’s salutation. Alternatively, users can actively "train" it by marking certain email messages as clutter. They can do that by either moving messages into the Clutter folder or by using the right button on a mouse to mark the messages via a pop-up menu.
Users can take advantage of Clutter once it is available for their Office 365 tenant. By default, Clutter is disabled and users can choose not to use it. It only starts to take action once it has learned a particular user's preferences and ignores any rules set up in Outlook, as rules take precedence over the Clutter feature.
Users of Office 365 business plans will start to see the Clutter feature later this month, although "first-release" testers already have access to Clutter. The feature is getting rolled out to English language users first.
Clutter works in the Outlook client for desktops, as well as in Outlook Web Apps. It also works with various mobile devices if they support using Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol.
This article originally appeared on Redmond, a sister site to GCN.