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What is Clutter anyway?
Clutter analyzes how you process all your email and moves the “unimportant stuff” out of your Inbox folder and places it into the Clutter folder. In theory, this should leave you with an emptier and distraction-free Inbox folder containing only high-priority emails and emails that interest you more.
So basically, the Clutter folder is your “second-tier” Inbox folder containing emails that you usually ignore.
How does Clutter actually work?
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 the message end up in the Clutter folder.
Clutter really uses the “Power of the Cloud” for this analysis via Office Graph without any additional costs or interaction from you; Just keep using email like you normally do is the best way to train Clutter.
Did Clutter get it wrong? Simply move the message back to your Inbox folder or any other folder. In OWA and Outlook 2016, you can also right-click on a message to mark it as Clutter or not to further train Clutter.
Note: Clutter doesn’t move any of your emails that you have already moved out of your Inbox folder and into another folder via a message rule.
Clutter vs Junk E-mail
Clutter differs from Junk E-mail in that it is coming from valid sources and/or people that you’ve interacted with before. Therefore, the message isn’t unsolicited (Junk E-mail), but it could still be low priority to you (Clutter).
For instance, Newsletters that you’ve signed up for yourself or messages from Groups that you are a part of aren’t spam (although they might end up in the Junk E-mail folder), but they could be low-priority to you, so they will end up in your Clutter folder.
Turning Clutter on or off
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 2 folders than. But 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 some training (this really only gets better as time goes by).
As I mentioned before, turning Clutter on or off can only be done via OWA.
- Log on to OWA.
- Click on the Gear icon in the top right corner of the page.
- Choose: Options.
- In the Mail section on the left, expand Automatic processing and click on: Clutter. This direct link should take you there as well.
- Select whether you want to turn Clutter on or off:
- On: Separate items identified as clutter.
- Off: Don’t separate items identified as clutter.
- Press the Save button in the top left corner.
- Press the Back button in front of Options in the top left corner to return to your Inbox.
The Clutter Options page also contains a nice little counter to indicate how useful Clutter has been to you over the past few days.