Announcing the Email Productivity Add-On: Like Autopilot for Time-Wasting Email

One of the biggest problems with business email today is that there is still way too much of it. A staggering 70% of employees feel that their inbox is a drain on productivity, and emails from vendors and marketers are to blame.

The average employee wastes around two business days per year just combing through external emails in their inbox. And our Abnormal data shows that executives bear more than double the burden, receiving 230% more graymail than the average employee.

Abnormal began four years ago to help enterprises stop the most damaging socially-engineered attacks that were bypassing legacy email security solutions. To do that better than anyone else, we combined a behavioral AI-based approach to detection with an API-based integration model, allowing us to directly integrate with the thousands of signals provided by cloud email platforms.

Along the way, our customers explained that they had another unsolved, and often under-acknowledged, problem: the promotionally-oriented email known as graymail. They told us that this type of email continues to land in employee inboxes at an alarming rate, sapping productivity.

The existing technical approaches to stopping graymail simply don’t work. Current solutions force enterprises to do one of two things:

1. Push the problem downstream to employees through spam digests and end-user quarantine portals

2. Set global graymail policies and manage an endless queue of one-off customization requests from individuals.

Just as static rules and policies have failed at stopping socially-engineered attacks, attempting to filter graymail using rules does not address the variance in content across these messages. This strategy also can’t scale to support thousands of users’ specific preferences. Today’s approaches are ineffective, and employees are paying the price in lost hours.

Today, Abnormal is announcing a new add-on module called Email Productivity. Email Productivity layers onto the core Inbound Email Security product, applying the same advanced behavioral AI, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) models that help stop the most sophisticated email-borne attacks to limit time-wasting email.

Like Inbound Email Security, the Email Productivity add-on is policy-free. For IT teams, there are no bespoke rules to set, scoring thresholds to define, policies to manage, or customizations to accommodate. It’s truly like putting graymail on autopilot—for IT teams and employees alike.

Our API-based approach to integration offers broad visibility into end-user behavior, preferences, and actions within Microsoft 365. These are data points that legacy email security providers either don’t process, don’t utilize, or both.

Employee preferences for graymail can vary widely. Email Productivity utilizes the ample available data about how users interact with their inbox to automatically personalize graymail delivery to each individual end user—self-learning and adapting protection over time.

Empowered with this auto-personalization, employees get an inbox that is tailored to their needs, and they never need to leave the native mail client to manage a personal block list. It’s finally time to ditch antiquated end-user quarantine portals and pesky spam digests, banishing them back to the 2000s where they belong.

Here are four productivity wins your business can accomplish with Email Productivity.

1. Measure the ROI of Limiting Graymail

Administrators can instantly evidence the value of limiting graymail at the organization level with insights on volume, senders, recipients, open rates, and productivity/time impact. Use the Graymail dashboard to hone in on problem areas—for instance, employees in the marketing department being targeted by specific advertising vendors—with the top recipients and top vendors views.

2. Precisely Detect Distracting Graymail, and Get It Out of the Way

Abnormal employs behavioral AI informed by tens of thousands of identity, behavior, and content signals to detect graymail with high efficacy. Once a graymail message is detected, Abnormal instantly moves it out of the user’s inbox and into a Promotions folder, removing it from their immediate workflow.

3. Automatically Personalize and Adapt Protection to Individual Employees Using Behavioral Cues

Where other email security solutions stop at policy-based remediation, Abnormal has deeper visibility into user behavior and actions which allows Email Productivity to constantly self-learn and adapt to end-user behavior. Personalization is enabled based on individual user movements between Promotions and Inbox. For example, when a Project Manager at your company moves a weekly Asana newsletter from Promotions into their primary inbox, she will begin to see Asana newsletters in her inbox going forward, whereas other users will continue to see it in their Promotions folder.

4. Gain More Business Value Out of Your Email Security Deployment

Make security a business enabler with an approach that allows for better security posture and executive productivity at the same time. Only Abnormal combines an API-based integration model with advanced, behavioral AI-based detection to eliminate risks and inefficiencies across the full spectrum of email—from the most advanced, never-before-seen attacks, to the challenge of time-wasting emails.

Organizations that have deployed Email Productivity see:

• A 13% reduction in inbox volume across all employees

• 16 hours of executive assistant time back per month

• 3 hours of IT time saved addressing tuning and configuration each week

Email Productivity requires the use of the core Abnormal Inbound Email Security product, and it is available today for Microsoft 365 only. Support for Google Workspace is planned down the road.

Discover more about Email Productivity and request a personalized demo today.