The problem:
People get more and more e-mails. After getting blasted with too many e-mails, they either get sorted or ignored.
E-mails that are ignored don't get acted upon. This wastes time in organizations, not just Microsoft, but out customers. Time is money.
The easy fix:
In Outlook (Desktop app and Outlook Online): Rollout tags and keywords into e-mails as "rectangles with text". Have them visible in the footer of the e-mail.
In Outlook (Desktop app and Outlook Online): Allow tags and keywords to be used in the e-mail sorting rules.
Automatic rule suggestions:
- Allow IT organizations & Microsoft to offer suggestion for sorting rules in the header of the e-mail. For example, Yammer notifications, Teams message notifications, Out-of-Office notifications from members of your team, Out-of-Office notifications from non-team members.
- By clicking a button "Preview and Add Recommended Rules", the user would review a short list of rule suggestions and decide whether or not to add one of them to Outlook.
- An IT organization could curate some rules. The IT organization could allow some e-mails to have rule suggestions offered by Microsoft (the IT organization whitelists which e-mails can receive suggestions - such as whitelisting all e-mails not created by a human being manually, such as all automated e-mails that are non-urgent/non-critical).
EDIT:
- This must be a feature that the organization's IT department enables. Until enabled by the organization, any changes to the UI should be completely invisible.
- If enabled by the organization, unless the user is part of the users who are enabled to see Keywords and Tags, the UI should remain invisible. This is so pilot deployment can be tested before widespread deployment.
- All users should have the ability to hide the changes to the UI in the header and footer, and the user's UI preferences should be saved and respected the next time the user opens their Outlook/Exchange.