1600. Remove Clutter using Outlook's Clutter feature

I get a ton of email daily, and outside of the standard spam, which gets handled reasonably well by spam filters, most of it is stuff I don’t need to handle right away—information from friends, recipes, sales from local stores, and so on. It would be great if there was some way to automatically move these emails into another location, so I could focus on the important stuff.

This question comes to us as if written by a Microsoft marketing person! If you’re using any of the Microsoft email services (Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, MSN.com, or Office 365), you have access to a great, relatively new feature named (appropriately) Clutter. These email services all provide the ability to sweep “clutter” from your inbox into a separate folder, again appropriately named Clutter. Note that the Clutter folder is meant for things other than spam or dangerous spam/phishing-related emails—it’s for legitimate email that simply isn’t urgent.

Microsoft makes it simple to manage your Clutter folder, as well. If you find an email in your Inbox folder that isn’t important, move it to the Clutter folder, and the mail engine will classify emails like that one as Clutter from then. The converse works as well: If an email ends up in the Clutter folder but it’s important, move it to the Inbox and future similar emails will remain in your Inbox folder.

Note that this feature works only with Microsoft’s email products. Google/Gmail provides a similar, if not quite as mature, feature using automatic labelling. If you want to clear your inbox from all the clutter, however, Microsoft makes this the easiest. Of course, Outlook.com and the rest of Microsoft’s online email services are free.

For more information on configuring and using Microsoft’s Clutter folder, check out this article: http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/03/making-clutter-office-365-even-better/.