Email remains the cornerstone of workplace communication, but it has also become one of the biggest drains on productivity. Across every department, inboxes are flooded with messages that demand attention but deliver little value. This clutter, known as graymail, now represents a significant share of corporate email volume.

Graymail includes:

• Unsolicited sales outreach

• High-volume marketing emails

• Recurring newsletters and industry digests

• Retail offers, coupons, and brand updates

• Low-priority mailing list and subscription traffic

Individually, these messages seem harmless—but together, they drown out what’s important. Abnormal data shows that executives receive over 230% more graymail than the average employee, leading to buried priorities, delayed decisions, and hours of lost productivity every week.

Graymail persists because legacy filtering tools and built-in mailbox controls rely on static rules and global policies that lack the precision to keep unwanted messages out. They simply aren’t designed to recognize the difference between low-value graymail and legitimate business communication.

These same systems also treat every user the same, unable to adapt to individual preferences where what’s unimportant to one person may be critical to another. As a result, security teams spend hours tuning filters and managing exceptions, while employees lose time struggling to find what matters.

Abnormal is the only email security vendor that uses behavioral AI to identify and manage graymail with unmatched precision. The result is a truly intelligent inbox that keeps essential business communication front and center while automatically filtering out distractions that legacy systems miss.

Why Abnormal Email Productivity Is Different

At its core, Abnormal takes a fundamentally different approach to managing graymail—one built on behavioral intelligence, adaptability, and simplicity rather than static rules or predefined policies. Our behavioral AI continuously learns how each person communicates to separate legitimate business messages from clutter, all without manual tuning or security team oversight.

Behavioral AI Detection

Rather than relying on static heuristics, Email Productivity understands how people communicate. Its models analyze communication context, sender relationships, and engagement patterns—drawing on more than 45,000 behavioral and contextual signals—to distinguish important business messages from graymail with exceptional accuracy.

Automatic Remediation and Native Experience

Detected graymail is automatically moved into a dedicated folder within Outlook or Gmail, keeping inboxes focused and organized. Operating entirely within the native email client delivers a seamless experience that fits naturally into existing workflows.

Adaptive Filtering and Personalization

The system automatically tailors filtering for each individual, ensuring every inbox highlights what matters most to its owner. It learns from user behavior—specifically when users drag and drop messages between folders—to automatically adjust safe and block lists to reflect personal preferences.

Zero Policy Management

The solution deploys instantly via API, with no manual policy creation, quarantines, or ongoing maintenance required. This hands-off approach eliminates the operational burden of traditional graymail controls, freeing security teams from constant rule management.

Measurable Productivity Insights

The built-in Graymail Dashboard quantifies productivity gains across the organization, displaying the total volume of graymail messages removed from inboxes, top senders, and estimated time saved. These insights give security leaders clear, data-backed evidence of ROI and highlight their role as true business enablers.

From the moment it’s deployed, Abnormal Email Productivity delivers measurable results across organizations. Customers report:

• Over 12% reduction in total inbox volume across all employees

• 500+ graymail messages removed from every executive inbox monthly

• 20+ graymail messages filtered out of employee inboxes every week

Beyond the numbers, the impact is felt across every level of the organization. Employees spend less time triaging irrelevant emails and more time on meaningful work. Managers and executives see faster decision-making because important messages no longer get buried under vendor outreach and promotions. Together, these results demonstrate how behavioral AI delivers not just cleaner inboxes, but measurable business value in hours of reclaimed productivity.

A CISO at a global manufacturing company described the difference:

“Our executives immediately noticed the difference. Before, they could barely stay ahead of their inboxes. Now they can see an entire week’s worth of important messages instead of just a few hours. It’s changed how they work, and how they view our security team.”

To see how Abnormal eliminates inbox noise and helps restore focus across the enterprise, schedule a personalized demo.