Email is a primary channel in our work lives and is an integral part of how we communicate and get things done. We continuously strive to make our life simpler and automate the repetitive tasks, and email is no different. This not only encompasses the enterprise email user but also the personal email user. Outlook has always provided users with mechanism to automate lot of different tasks, but with Office 365 things are becoming even more easier. The focus is around saving time and making a day more productive for an end user. You can see some of these in my previous post in this series:
1. Day in Life of an Office 365 User
2. Clutter
Three tips listed below helps me save a ton of time, hope it helps you too.
1. Clutter – Found under the Home–>Delete tab in the ribbon. This newly introduced feature in Office 365 outlook works on the Azure machine learning algorithm.
Trivia question – can you point out another feature which uses this machine learning algorithm? (answer at the end of the post)
This feature (requires turning ON) will learn your behavior over time and move messages over to the “Clutter” folder. Unread messages, messages you don’t reply to are interpreted as clutter and are moved over to the clutter folder. You can also manually move messages over and help this feature to become smarter quicker.
2. Ignore – This feature has been part of Exchange 2013 as well as Office 365 and is a great reply to the mass distribution list emails we get on a daily basis. I’m talking about the welcome and promotion emails to which people respond with “reply all”. If you’re like me, you do not want to get bombarded with those reply all emails. Use this feature and move the current and future messages directly over to “Deleted Items.”
3. 
Clean Up – Found under the Home–> Delete tab in the ribbon. This feature removes redundant messages in a conversation. Now this is different from the “Ignore” feature in that it only removes/deletes the redundant messages keeping intact the original and new messages. So think of times when an email was sent to a distribution list and then people reply with new information. Each reply typically carries the footprint of the previous reply. In that case the previous message (which is now part of the new one) is removed from the conversation. You can clean up at three different levels a. Conversation b. Folder c. Sub Folder
Know how of tips & tricks are important for any product or software and having some in your pocket almost guarantees to make your day more productive.
Trivia Answer – Office Graph in Delve
