How do you use Clutter in Office 365?

Last week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Facebook Chief Information Officer Tim Campos announced that Facebook deployed Microsoft Office 365 for a handful of reasons. From the Business Insider article:

“… key aspects of our culture are things like ‘be bold, move fast… Most importantly, ‘move fast.’  That aspect of our culture is most important, and that’s where Office 365 comes in.”

Campos also praised Office’s ability to help Facebook’s employees deal with the mounds of data that they generate both internally and externally by way of artificial-intelligence-driven tools like Microsoft Delve and Microsoft Exchange’s Clutter feature for filtering unimportant messages.

The Clutter feature is nothing new, and it’s been enabled by default in Office 365 for over a year.  The idea makes sense:  items identified by Office 365 as irrelevant – spam posts that get through, or mail that’s never read or accessed – gets placed in a Clutter folder, and doesn’t fill up a user’s mailbox.   This can be very valuable to a company like Facebook, that has “mounds of data” to work with.

But on another level, how accurate can one expect Office 365 to be?  Users don’t always access items to read them – i.e., many work with the Reading pane.  Clutter will also automatically place “ham” emails – i.e., bulk mailings – into the Clutter folder unless recipients intervene.  Users may also object to another folder they need to regularly check for items.  For all these reasons, we’re finding some IT organizations looking to turn Clutter off.

Clutter in Office 365: is it a good thing, or a bad thing? Chances are, it will annoy some users and please others in its attempt to “unclutter” mailboxes.Click To Tweet

Clutter uses machine learning and user interaction to ensure that important messages get to your inbox, while low-priority messages get set aside for processing later.  Administrators can also configure Clutter retention policies, as well as create rules to allow specific senders and messages to bypass Clutter completely.

What do you think?  Is Clutter a helpful feature?  Do you use it?  Let us know.