What is Clutter?
With Office 365 Education email, Missouri State faculty and staff can now use a new feature called Clutter. Clutter is designed to help you filter low-priority email, saving time for your most important messages. Basically, the Clutter folder is your “second-tier” Inbox folder containing emails that you usually ignore.
How is Clutter different than junk email?
Clutter differs from junk email by the fact that it is coming from a valid source or people whom you’ve interacted with before. The message isn’t unsolicited, but it could still be low priority to you. Email in your Clutter folder will not be automatically deleted as Trash or marked as spam like Junk.
How does it work?
When your email account first migrated to Office 365 Education, your Clutter folder was most likely empty, or close to it. As you view your email, Clutter learns your habits and ignored emails start being filtered to the Clutter folder.
Clutter uses a mix of behavioral pattern and content analysis to determine the likelihood that you are going to ignore the email. Only when this likelihood is very high will your behavior cause the message to end up in the Clutter folder.
It might take Clutter a few days to fully adapt to your preferences as the system records your choices and uses this information to identify similar messages in the future. And as your reading habits change, Clutter learns and adapts.
Leaving Clutter turned on will make it more reliable, and it usually doesn’t make the same mistake twice. The result could be an emptier and distraction-free Inbox folder containing only high priority emails and emails which interest you more.
Did Clutter get it wrong?
You can help Clutter learn your choices faster by performing some simple actions.
- If you see a low-priority email in your Inbox, right-click the message and choose Move to Clutter, or drag the email from your Inbox and drop it into the Clutter folder.
- If you see a message that was sent to Clutter by mistake, right-click the message and choose Move to inbox, or drag the email from the Clutter folder and drop it in your Inbox.
Can I turn Clutter off or on again?
If you are receiving more than 50 emails per day, leaving Clutter on, or turning it on if it is currently off, might be a real time-saver after a few days of it learning your preferences. Follow this guide on How to Turn On Clutter Filtering.
But if you only receive a handful of emails per day, Clutter might not be for you, as it is probably more work for you to check two folders. Follow this guide on How to Turn Off Clutter Filtering.
A few additional tidbits about Clutter.
- Junk email is filtered first, then Outlook processes any Message Rules you’ve set up. Next, based on your past behavior, Clutter will filter low priority messages.
- The Clutter folder remains in Outlook even after you turn off the feature.
- The Clutter Options page also contains a nice little counter to indicate how useful Clutter has been to you over the past few days.
Learn more about Clutter and other Office 365 Education features and tools at https://support.office.com/.
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