Beware the ideas of March - Brummie Shakespeare
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Microsoft revamps Hotmail
SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has overhauled Hotmail in an update that "declares war on graymail".
Microsoft defines 'graymail' as email that is reported as spam but is actually legitimate content, such as newsletters or notifications that users have signed up to receive. The firm plans to address this problem by rolling out various tools over the coming weeks.
Graymail apparently accounts for 75 per cent of the emails that users reported as being spam.
Microsoft said in its blog, "What really characterizes graymail is that the same message that one person thinks is 'spam' could be really important to another person. It's not black and white, hence the name."
"We're excited to announce five powerful tools to help you take control of your inbox, get rid of graymail, and keep track of the email that's important to you."
For starters is newsletter filtering that allows users to highlight and delete newsletters or unsubscribe from them from within Hotmail. Custom categories will mean emails can be, er, categorised rather than sent to separate folders.
Further, a scheduled clean-up feature will keep your Hotmail inbox tidy by deleting old emails or moving them to a folder automatically based upon a user defined setting. For example, it can delete all messages from a certain sender except for the most recent.
A small change is that flagged emails get pinned to the top of the inbox and stay put even when new email arrives. Emails from selected senders can be set to be automatically flagged when they arrive.
Lastly are instant actions that give users a selection of options, such as delete or flag, when the mouse is hovered over an email.
If this doesn't sound like enough of a re-jig to get Hotmail up to speed with, say, Gmail, Microsoft said that it is "still just getting started", and added, "We'll have more on these features and others as they roll out in the coming weeks." µ
Tags: Software
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instead of dictating what user should be left with after few days... bith hotmail and google should avoid giving shitty search algos inside email .. thought they pretend its same enterprise search algo. i often miss emails while searching on people names. another example while typing in TO field autocomplete works for starting part of address book not between, even ancient nokia sets do an instring/substring while typing key words to find in phonebook. After this algos enhancement and bringing true bing/google search into inboxes.. they should put an Organizer-Tool to swiftly on fly create folders and throw around emails as we do with files in hdd. Lastly a tool like for Disk storage/mapping/charting like Xinorbis, GrandPerspective. Finally a frightening discovery a while back ... viewing a mail in gMail can be like sitting on that website, gmail preview-pane ran all scripting from that site and i even got a certificate error from that website into my gmail mail-preview-pane... my luck that i had deleted DigiNotar certs from my browsers just few days back. Over this one more pathetic from hotmail/gmail is that u cannot mark emails as phishing without email-preview-pane i.e. inbox-list-view i.e. by deciding on suspicious mail by From/Subject, i agree not most ppl are so macho to decide just on these params that a mail is phishing but again do u really have to be first stung by phishing i.e. as mensioned above; even gmail-view-pane runs most scripts. For this, there should be flat-view/rtf (without embeded scripts or links) or a jpeg version like opera-mini does i.e. u do view what all those formatting scripts would have created but without any scripts running on client.
Wow now THAT is some serious technological INNOVATION. I sure hope that they patent this INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY so that nobody else can use it without paying royalties to continue the massive R&D that developed it.