Is Microsoft on to something with “Graymail”?

For many tech-savvy web users, Microsoft’s Hotmail has become a badge of ancient times, a service that was valid a few years ago but that has gone the way of AOL as a symbol of not being “up with the times” in email technology. People who see their friends using it might ask, “Why aren’t you using Gmail?”

Tech-snobs aside, the service is still extremely popular and their most recent innovation may give even the tech-savvy crowd a reason to check out their old Hotmail inboxes if only to use it for the gray-area emails. When they declared war on “Graymail” a month ago, they introduced a set of tools that will be appealing to people who subscribe to a lot of services, newsletters, or product updates but who don’t really care about getting those updates.

It happens all the time. We sign up for a new social media service or game and we either forget to click the radio button off that says we would like to receive updates, or we didn’t anticipate the volume at which those updates. Those emails, according to Microsoft, are Graymail, and Microsoft has a solution.

In the infographic below, our friends at Litmus point out that this might be desirable for users, but marketers are going to hate it.

(H/T: Nissan Puyallup)