Flash back two years ago. On John’s commute into work on the O-Train he scans through his emails. He skips through industry announcements and newsletters and opens Today @ Carleton. He scrolls past social media notifications and reads an email from a colleague.
Today: John is still checking his email on his way into work. Only now he is seeing a lot less in his inbox. He quickly accesses the emails that need his attention. All of those other emails – the industry announcements, social media notifications, and industry newsletters – are still there waiting for him, they’ve simply have been filtered into his Clutter folder.
What is Clutter?
Clutter is an email-filtering feature available to staff and faculty using Carleton’s Exchange email service. It automatically diverts low priority messages from your inbox so that you can quickly identify your important messages.
How Clutter Works
You control what type of emails go into your Clutter folder. The Clutter feature notes what type of emails you ignore, delete, don’t reply to, don’t forward and begins moving subsequent similar messages into your Clutter folder for you to view at your leisure. It also sends you a weekly summary of these moves.
You control what emails go into your Clutter folder. When you do so you are training the tool to filter similar emails.
Marking messages as “clutter” or “not clutter”
If messages are going into your Clutter folder and you want them to appear in your Inbox, simply drag and drop it into your Inbox. Subsequent similar messages will no go directly to your Inbox. If you use Outlook 2016 or OWA (exchange.carleton.ca), you can alternatively right click on the message and choose ‘mark as not clutter’.
If you are receiving emails in your Inbox that you want to automatically go to your Clutter folder, you can simply drag and drop them into your Clutter folder or even delete them. Subsequent similar messages will go directly into your Clutter folder. If you use Outlook 2016, you can alternatively right click on the message and choose ‘mark as not clutter’.
Not interested in using Clutter? No Problem.
If you do not want to use this feature, you can disable it. This will send all emails into your inbox. Here’s how:
- Log into the Outlook Web App (OWA) website: exchange.carleton.ca
- Click on the Gear icon in the upper right-hand corner; select Options, then Clutter in the left-hand navigation list
- Uncheck “Separate items identified as clutter”