Introducing Email Productivity for Google Workspace: Eliminate Inbox Clutter and Enhance Productivity

In the relentless flow of email communication, graymail messages inundate inboxes with sales outreach, newsletters, and advertisements, overwhelming employees and silently eroding productivity.

Abnormal data indicates that employees may encounter upwards of 50 graymail messages weekly, while executives grapple with a staggering 230% more promotional messages than the average employee.

IT’s attempts to filter out graymail using global policies and rules can often compound the problem with unintended consequences, including a surge of IT tickets from users complaining about deliverability issues, or problems with end-user quarantines and digests.

Soon, the seemingly harmless task of individually sorting through graymail messages becomes a time-consuming challenge, draining productivity and diverting focus from high-impact tasks. Abnormal has set out to confront this challenge with its Email Productivity product, which is now available for Google Workspace users.

In August 2022, Abnormal introduced Email Productivity as an add-on module to the Inbound Email Security product. To detect graymail with high precision, Email Productivity applies the same behavioral AI, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) models used to stop inbound email attacks.

Once detected, graymail is automatically removed from each employee’s inbox and placed into an accessible dedicated folder. Understanding that employee preferences for graymail can vary widely, Email Productivity self-learns and adapts the delivery of graymail, which users can personalize by moving messages between the inbox and the graymail folder.

Like Inbound Email Security, Email Productivity is policy-free. This means IT teams no longer have to grapple with filtering rules, questions about digests and quarantines, and customizations to accommodate specific users.

Email Productivity is now available for Google Workspace environments. Google users can enjoy the same filtering of time-wasting emails from employee inboxes in an adaptive and policy-free way that our Microsoft customers have come to know and love.

When deployed in a Google environment, Email Productivity will automatically remove promotional messages from the inbox and place them into a graymail label, as seen below.

Email Productivity surfaces its findings in a dashboard within the Abnormal Portal where it shares graymail-specific information such as:

• The projected time savings for employees and VIPs

• The quantity and frequency of graymail detected

• Which employees and VIPs are most affected by graymail

• Which organizations are sending your employees the most graymail

Users of Gmail may be familiar with Google’s Promotions tab. This is how Google auto-filters overtly promotional emails in the email tenant.

Email Productivity offers unique advantages when compared to Google’s promotional filtering:

1. EPR is configured and deployed globally. Google administrators cannot enable/disable the promotions category globally. Each employee has to configure their individual inbox settings to enable/disable the promotions category within their instance of Gmail.
   
   

2. Abnormal considers a whole spectrum of factors including email content/topics whereas Google does not significantly consider content. This results in a higher volume of graymail detected and removed from the inbox for Email Productivity customers.
   
   

3. The graymail dashboard provides visibility on the prevalence of graymail within the organization. It also provides reporting for IT teams to measure time savings from EPR. Google provides no reporting or visibility on the prevalence of graymail within the organization.

The release of Email Productivity for Google Workspace ushers in a new era of possibilities when it comes to improving employee productivity by reducing the quantity of graymail.

"Sunrun is pleased with the quality of the services and support Abnormal provides,” said Tom Madar, Director of Technology Operations at Sunrun. “Deployment of Abnormal's Email Productivity security services in the Sunrun Google environment was straightforward, with no complex tuning, setup, or operational overhead required.”

While Email Productivity is newly available to Google Workspace users, its productivity-bolstering technology has been put to work in Microsoft environments for just over a year.

Hundreds of Abnormal customers, including the largest Fortune 500 companies, have deployed Email Productivity since its initial launch. In its inaugural year, customers of Email Productivity have experienced some amazing results:

1. Removed approximately 3 BILLION graymail messages from inboxes

2. Saved more than 7 MILLION hours previously spent sifting through those pesky promotional emails

3. Increased the satisfaction of more than 80,0000 executives by decluttering their inboxes

4. Enhanced security operations center (SOC) efficiency by minimizing the time spent triaging user-reported emails of graymail messages, streamlining a process that security analysts spend upwards of 30 hours a week working on.

If you are interested in improving employee productivity, it's time to explore what Email Productivity can do for your organization.

Email Productivity provides a solution to the pervasive issue of graymail by automatically detecting and removing promotional messages. It has proven successful in Microsoft environments over the past year, saving time for employees and executives, streamlining security operations, and earning positive feedback from customers. Now available for Google Workspace, Email Productivity offers policy-free, adaptive graymail management, making it a compelling solution for Google users aiming to boost employee productivity.

Email Productivity is an add-on product to Abnormal Security’s core Inbound Email Security product. For more information and to see how it can increase productivity in your organization, request a personalized demo today.