Stay the fuck out of my mailbox.
If only Outlook provided a function which would allow us to define, oh, I don’t know, call them rules so that we could organize our inbox on our own…
So you’re telling the people who host your mail and send and receive emails to/from you to stay out of your mailbox? I sense a disconnect here. And if you don’t like it turn it off.
Sounds like anti-spam Lite. I suppose you really hate all forms of anti-spam too.
Features like this remind me of the NEST learning thermostat and others like it. Studies purport to find that people save energy even if they already had a programmable thermostat, but they also happily admit the savings comes from people who were too stupid or lazy to actually program their programmable thermostat one time. It’s not like NEST is better at saving energy than you are if you put your mind to it.
So nobody is really saying that setting up manual e-mail rules for 5 minutes will deliver worse results than letting an algorithm do it, but if you’re so lazy you can’t bother to do it, their algorithm might be better than chaos.
It’s weird because I can’t disagree in aggregate, but it’s completely inapplicable to my life.
It was the same logic that said putting passive (automatic) seatbelts in cars would save lives. Individually the best passive seat belts worked far less well than the crappiest conventional belts. But it 99% solved the compliance problem.
The fact it risked the lives of the thoughtful careful people while improving the odds for the stupid and lazy irked me no end. Fortunately a couple years later NHTSA & DOT came to their senses and that experiment came to an end.
There’s already an anti-spam, the Junk Folder. I don’t hate it but even at a low setting it puts emails into Junk that are legitimate emails. I am often having people tell me they sent me an email that I never got, and sure enough it ended up in Junk. Even if I mark the sender as safe, Outlook puts them in there anyway. So I’m not really wild about that one either. Maybe other clients/providers do a better job, but this is my employer’s email system.
What I don’t want is the people who are hosting my mail deciding for me what I should read and what is “clutter”. And I know I can turn it off (see my quoted text in OP), but I shouldn’t *have *to turn it off. It should be off by default. They should announce it and invite me to turn it on if I actually want it.
What this did was create an additional folder in my folder list, displacing my “sent” folder.
I could move things around tonget back the positioning I am used to, but it was still irksome.
Microsoft – we know better than you and we’re for damned sure not asking permission.
Sounds like GMail sorting into Social and Promotion tabs (plus others, those are defaults).
It doesn’t bother me if optional. I have work-supplied 2013 so this isn’t likely to affect me for the time being.
Were those the ones that increased the chance of injury, particularly in small children? Something about “chance of beheading”?
Yup.
^ I have this problem
My e-mail is constantly putting e-mail from my employer into the “junk” folder, apparently because my employer is a big box store so anything from them is assumed to be junk advertising.
The on/off “feature” cannot be toggled from inside the Outlook application. It forces one to create an account on and sign into the Outlook Web App. I’ve never used their web app, havd no idea it existed and would have been perfectly happy to continue in that state of blissful ignorance - except I can’t. MS, it’s infinite wisdom, has decided to add another layer of complexity to the whole equation. There is nothing good about the way this is being implemented.
Thank you Straight Dope. I didn’t know why the Clutter folder all the sudden existed. I thought I must have hit a button by mistake and created it.
I don’t like the way it still counts as unread mail, though. It’s unwanted. I don’t need to know that it has content.
I have the opposite problem. Ever since my employer pushed the new Outlook through, I have to keep reminding the thing that it’s supposed to block certain senders. The fact that my job title used to be Tech Support does not mean I’m interested in IT Solution Journal, FindWhitePapers, BoTB Pulse, etc. They’re spam, you stupid thing!
mark these as “safe” and problem solved
Yeah… for about a month then something or other resets and I’m digging through my junk folder again…
The great irony for me was the first two emails that ended up in my Clutter folder were their own Clutter folder announcements.
Yeah, me too. I didn’t even know about Clutter until this thread, and then I looked to see their announcement–in the Clutter folder, which I hadn’t even noticed.
Problem not solved. I have marked several domains as “safe” (Never block sender’s domain) and they still often go to Junk.
With the Gmail equivalent, they didn’t force it on you if you already had other filters in place. At least, they didn’t for me.
(I did eventually try it out, anyways, and, while I liked the UI, it wasn’t customizable, so I dropped it. Then I had to go back and set it back up where unread mail is kept separate. I just can’t use email any other way, anymore.)