Celebrating Two Years of Email Productivity with Six Million Mailboxes

It’s been two years since we launched Email Productivity, a product born out of a pressing need to address the problem of promotional emails cluttering inboxes. Customers asked if we could apply our AI-native detection engine to identify and filter out these distractions, and we delivered. Since then, nearly 1,500 organizations have adopted Email Productivity, streamlining nearly six 6 million individual mailboxes and transforming the email experience for employees.

Promotional emails, or "graymail," have become a significant time drain, with the average employee receiving dozens of these messages every week. The impact is even more pronounced for VIPs, whose inboxes are inundated with non-essential communications. Drawing from both customer feedback and our own experiences, we developed a solution that not only filters out graymail but also adapts to each user’s unique preferences—because one person’s trash can indeed be another’s treasure.

Email Productivity doesn’t just clear the clutter; it delivers measurable results. Organizations using the product have reported substantial productivity gains and cost savings. As the product has evolved, we've introduced significant enhancements, such as support for Google Workspace, improved detection capabilities, and new features like Delegate Management. These developments have made Email Productivity an even more powerful tool for keeping inboxes organized and employees focused.

In the last three months, we’ve detected 2.3 BILLION graymail messages for our Email Productivity customers. Executives and employees are burdened by the sheer volume of this graymail, with executives receiving nearly three times more than the average employee. This influx of non-essential emails wastes significant time, with employees losing at least two business days per year just sorting through external messages.

Meanwhile, IT teams are overwhelmed by the constant flow of user requests related to deliverability issues, end-user quarantines, and managing allowlists and blocklists, further straining resources.

Have you been here before? An employee submits a ticket because an email was quarantined as promotional. The IT team spends time resolving the issue and communicating back to the employee, only for the same sender to cause problems again. It's an inefficient process that distracts employees, IT teams, and executives alike. While email digests and quarantines offer partial solutions, there's a better way.

Abnormal leverages AI to detect graymail with high levels of accuracy, rather than solely relying on basic filtering rules. Once identified, Abnormal will instantly move the email out of the employee inbox and into a dedicated separate folder. This removes the need for digest emails and quarantine portals, never requiring the employee to leave the native email experience.

Recognizing that every employee's preference for promotional emails differs, we've added personal safelisting and blocklisting. Employees can simply drag messages in and out of the promotions folder to control future deliveries from that sender. This eliminates the need for intervention from the IT team, allowing them to reclaim time that was previously spent tediously working on those support tickets.

Email Productivity is an intuitive product that is easily adopted by employees. You can see the employee experience for yourself by viewing our product tours for Microsoft and Google environments.

“Email Productivity took my mailbox from being filled with hundreds of graymail messages a day to just email that is actionable. The executive administrative assistants are in love with Email Productivity.”
- Bryan S. Willett, CISO, Lexmark

For those skeptical about the value of Email Productivity, let's break down the potential return on investment with an example.

For an organization with 2,000 employees and associated mailboxes, we expect to observe approximately 3.6 million graymail messages over the course of a year (based on Abnormal customer data). To calculate the ROI of Email Productivity, we will look at two things:

1. The time savings resulting from a decluttered inbox

2. The cost savings of reclaiming the time spent filtering those messages

If an employee spends just 3 seconds reviewing each promotional email, that adds up to 3,000 hours company-wide. At an average FTE cost of $50 per hour, this results in a $150,000 negative impact on productivity.

Customers of Email Productivity have access to a dashboard that provides comprehensive reporting on the impact of graymail to the company. This includes reporting on the quantity and frequency of graymail delivered, the employees and VIPs most affected, and the time savings resulting from Email Productivity.

With Email Productivity, employees no longer have to wade through a cluttered inbox filled with promotional emails, allowing them to focus on business-critical tasks without distractions. If they do need access to a promotional message, they can easily find it in the promotions folder—no need to log into a separate platform or submit a support ticket to IT. This streamlined process keeps employees on task and reduces the burden on IT teams, but don’t take our word for it. Here’s what Abnormal customers have to say about Email Productivity:

“In the last 30 days, Abnormal filtered more than 176,000 graymail messages. That’s over 500 hours of our people's time. Employees say Email Productivity has freed them from spending their mental energy assessing emails for risk and importance.”
- Blaine Carter, CIO, FranklinCovey

“Abnormal Email Productivity reduced the number of user-reported emails, because those messages never hit the inbox. Our team has fewer false negatives to investigate, and users can access those messages in their promotions folder whenever they want. Everyone saves time, and people have noticed. The CEO mentioned it to me in the elevator, and I've been on calls where people say, “Can I just tell you how much I love that graymail protection?”
- Brian Markham, EAB

Ready to experience the benefits of Email Productivity in your organization? Schedule a demo today!