Clutter is a new mailbox management feature of Office 365 for Business which is also coming to Outlook.com (once your mailbox is migrated to the Exchange Online platform) but most likely not to Exchange 2016 on-premises users.It can be turned on or off via a setting in Outlook Web App (OWA) and not from within Outlook (not even Outlook 2016).

Office 365 offers a great set of tools to help people and organisations get their jobs done, and work smarter. However, with a great set of tools comes a great amount of notifications and information to keep tabs on. You receive emails to notify you of tasks allocated, messages missed, actions completed, and a variety of other reasons. This isn’t unique to Office 365.

It’s fairly common across most tools, but let’s focus on what you can do inside of Office 365 to manage your clutter. Manage Your Email I’m an inbox zero kind of guy. It’s disheartening when I see an inbox with an item count into the triple or quadruple digits, let alone an unread count in the double or triple digits. While I rarely get it, I try to keep my inbox under 15 items in total. Here’s how I achieve my personal goal: Unsubscribe from newsletters It’s all to easy to delete an email, especially if you simply swipe from a mobile app. But that email will come back. Find the Unsubscribe link at the bottom and make sure it’s gone for good.

Outlook now has an Unsubscribe button which will help you perform that action too. Create rules If you get regular emails from certain places that are simply informational – create a rule to move them to another folder. While it can lead to ‘out of sight, out of mind’, it can also allow you to deal with important things in your Inbox and then deal with everything else later.

Use Focused Inbox Outlook in Office 365 introduces a feature called “Focused Inbox” (formerly known as “Clutter”) that uses machine learning to understand your email patterns which focuses your email for you. If you respond quickly to an individual, it recognises them and keeps their emails in your Inbox. If you change your email behaviour with that person, Outlook will adapt and move the email out of your immediate view.

The system continually adapts to ensure that the emails you see in your inbox are the ones you need to know about. Delete Deleting an email doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gone forever. In Office 365, mailboxes range between 50-100GB depending on the Enterprise plan. We don’t have to worry about purging our Deleted Items folder to save space. Do you keep postal letters, newspapers, junk mail, catalogues, and printed documents forever – or do you throw them out when you’re done with them?

Treat your Inbox like you would any printed mail; toss it when you’re done with it. If you ever need to find an email, running a search across your mailbox will look in your Deleted Items too – so you’re safe there. Clean up conversations and folders A long standing, existing feature in Outlook is the ability to clean up conversations and folders. Laptop wont read my passport for mac. This uses some smarts to look at conversation threads and removes the older ones so you don’t have to wade through each of them to follow the thread. Press the button and poof; a whole bunch of emails get removed from your Inbox. Manage Your Notifications I hear from users of Office 365 that they get too many notifications.

From Outlook on their desktop, in the Yammer app, in the Teams app, from other apps and services popping up, and also through those same apps sending notifications as emails. Spend a couple of minutes per application to look at the notification settings and determine what’s right for you. Do you need Teams popping up every time somebody likes your comment? Probably not.

Turn that off. Do you want Yammer sending you an email for every post in a conversation thread? Probably not. Change it to be a daily digest, or turn it off. Each app has its own notification settings.