Clutter vs Junk mail – Office 365

With Office 365, users have been presented with a new feature called Clutter. What is Clutter, and why is it different than the Junk Mail folder? Junk Mail is for email that is suspected to be spam, or has the characteristics of spam. Clutter on the other hand is not necessarily email that you do not want. With the Clutter feature turned on, your Inbox is kept clean of enormous amounts of unread emails. As emails come in and you do not read them, Clutter begins to train itself and move those unread emails out of your Inbox. The problem is that, just because you don’t read the email, it does not necessarily mean that you do not want to see it in your Inbox.

Unfortunately, there is no management to the process of training the Clutter feature. The only way to “teach” it anything is to move message out of the Clutter folder and back into the Inbox. Likewise, you can move things into the Clutter folder to have it process those items as clutter in the future.

It takes time to train yourself to check the Clutter folder, which for some users has caused frustration, since they think they are not getting emails, when in fact the emails are just being moved from the Inbox for them.

Turning the feature off can only be done through OWA in Office 365.