The Office 365 Clutter feature is a machine learning software that silently watches your email habits in the background and then after a while, starts moving emails it has noticed you’re not opening and moves them to the Clutter folder.
Clutter came out in November, 2014 and was originally turned off for every user. As of June this year (2015), this feature is now automatically enabled for everyone. If you’re an Office 365 user, you may or may not have noticed a Clutter folder under your inbox. It took me a while to notice it was there as I have quite a few folders as sub-folders of my inbox.
Here’s a look at my Clutter folder and the contents. Clutter noticed that I never opened up any of my birthday email reminders, so now they all go in there. In a way, I like it as I don’t do much with them. In another way, I have missed some people’s birthdays because they all go in there. After all, it would be kind of spooky and creepy if Clutter knew who my close friends are! So a shortcoming of Clutter is that it could move some emails we don’t want moved. Also, I have my email set with a reading pane on the right, so I don’t need to open all emails. This could also cause some ‘mistakes’ for Clutter.
Train Clutter
Clutter is trainable. You can take an integral part in training Clutter. Yes, Clutter emails me every week or so and asks me to take some time to check my folder and if there are things in there that shouldn’t be, just drag them back into the inbox and Clutter will learn to not put them in anymore – smart.
Conversely, if there are emails you don’t want to see, drag them into the Clutter folder and Clutter will learn from your actions.
If you are the administrator of your office’s Office 365 tenant (account), you have the power to turn Clutter off and on for all or selected users. This article has more information on that.
End-User Has Power Over Clutter Too
The end-user still has control over using Clutter or not. Now that it’s been turned on by default, here are the steps for turning it off.
- Log into your web O365 account and click on ‘Mail’.
- Click on the gear icon located in the upper right part of the page.
- Click on ‘Options.
- Click on ‘Clutter’ in the list and make your selections.
As you see from my Clutter options below I’m having Clutter continue watching my email and I’m getting weekly notifications about what’s been moved.
Depending on your email volume, Clutter may or may not save you a lot of time. Since it’s now on by default, you might as well take a look inside your Clutter folder and see what is or isn’t working for you.
Contest Results for My Email Subscribers
You may recall the book give away contest announced last week. Well, since there were no responses, either the give away wasn’t very enticing or my questions were asking too much of you all or you aren’t a very chatty group 🙂
So I’ll think about making it easier for you to answer questions – because I do want to write about what you are wanting to hear about.
