Hotmail is reborn. On October 3, 2011, Monday, Microsoft pushed the reboot button on the world’s biggest email service. It unveiled a series of new features intended to help the email service’s approximately 350 million users better sort through the clutter in their inboxes. Because of the company’s efforts to fight a negative public perception of Hotmail, five new features were rolled out at Windows Live event in San Francisco.

One new feature is a new tool to deal with “graymail”, which means newsletters and social networking updates that aren’t quite considered spam but aren’t quite considered legitimate emails. It is a way to automatically clean up an inbox, improve flags to move key emails to the top of the mailbox, and more. 

Dick Craddock, program manager for the Hotmail service, said “75 percent of email identified as spam by our customers, actually turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having signed up on a legitimate website”.

To sort through those items, the company launched a new newsletter category that lets users flag such emails and read them at their leisure, or simply delete the darn things. A one-click unsubscribe feature makes it easy to stop getting an unwanted newsletter as well, something that should come as a relief to those suffering from inbox bloat.

The company also introduced a scheduled cleanup feature to keep only the latest event email from a site, yet another way of keeping out the clutter.
Since the war on graymail isn’t just about deleting things or moving them to folders, the company revamped the email service’s flag feature, a handy way to track important messages by “pinning” them to the top of the inbox. You can set up rules to automatically flag messages as well.

Yahoo’s mail service is the second biggest, with approximately 310 million users worldwide, 40 million fewer than Hotmail. Gmail may be regarded as hip, but it has about 90 million fewer users worldwide. In the U.S. however, Hotmail lags behind, with about half as many users as Yahoo.
The company promises more features in the weeks to come.