In a recent blog post from the Windows Live team Hotmail declared war on “graymail,” its newly coined term for those semi-legit e-mail messages that build up in the inbox. These include newsletters, offers, and other email communications that people have agreed to. Microsoft shows some impressive work against spam, cutting Inbox spam to just 3 percent. But so many of us use our hotmail accounts precisely for the purpose of signing up for newsletters and other stuff of marginal interest to us -- when our e-mail addresses are held ransom for some other service we are really interested in (like, for instance, an account that lets us comment on our favorite blogs).

At that time, the Microsoft blog said: "We realized that getting rid of true spam wasn’t enough, because 75% of the email messages that people reported as spam are really legitimate newsletters, offers, or notifications that you just don’t want anymore." It then proclaimed that stuff "graymail" and introduced series of new features to clean that old junk out.

The folks at Litmus have built this graphic demonstrating those features and their intended effects. Will this make you shrug off Gmail and return to Hotmail as your go-to personal e-mail?

Click to enlarge image.