Security teams are being asked to do more with less.

Threat volume keeps rising. Attackers are using AI to move faster. And SOC teams are still expected to improve response, reduce risk, and prove value without adding headcount. That reality is forcing leaders to scrutinize the work that consumes analyst time but does little to improve security outcomes. One recurring source of that drag: graymail.

Graymail isn’t malicious. It’s the steady stream of newsletters, promotions, sales outreach, and low-priority notifications that flood inboxes every day. But for the SOC, it still creates operational friction—adding noise, increasing support overhead, driving user frustration, and pulling time away from more strategic work.

Abnormal Email Productivity helps eliminate that burden by taking graymail triage off the team’s plate so analysts can focus on higher-value security work.

And the impact shows up quickly. On average:

• 480+ graymail emails kept out of executives’ inboxes every month

• 21 graymail emails per week removed from the average employee inbox

• 12% overall decrease in inbox volume across the organization by rerouting graymail

To see how Abnormal Email Productivity gives time back to your security team, schedule a personalized demo.

Graymail is often framed as an employee productivity issue. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story.

Behind the scenes, graymail creates a constant maintenance load for security teams as they:

• Manage global spam and marketing policies that never satisfy every stakeholder

• Manually adjust blocklists and exceptions when important mail gets caught

• Review user-reported “phishing” that turns out to be newsletters and product updates

• Monitor quarantines and digests that users don’t understand or don’t trust

• Respond when inbox rules break or executives complain about clutter

That is the hidden cost of graymail: time-consuming, low-signal work that keeps skilled teams stuck in maintenance mode.

Abnormal Email Productivity (EPR) takes graymail triage off your team’s plate by learning what “normal” looks like in your environment at both the organizational and individual level.

Instead of static rules or one-size-fits-all marketing filters, Email Productivity:

• Uses behavioral AI and 45,000+ detection signals to precisely identify graymail

• Continuously learns each user’s preferences by observing how they drag and drop messages between inbox and graymail folders, automatically tailoring safelists and blocklists per person without manual tuning

• Automatically routes graymail to a dedicated Promotions folder in Outlook or Graymail label in Gmail—no separate portal, no digest to manage, no end-user quarantine frustration

• Requires zero policy management, deploying via API in minutes with no rules to write, tune, or maintain over time

There are no global filtering rules to maintain, no digest portals for users to monitor, and no ongoing exception-handling cycle for admins and analysts. Graymail triage is handled end to end, natively and autonomously.

For the SOC, that isn’t just cleaner inbox management—it’s meaningful time back that can be redirected toward higher-value security work.

The immediate benefit of Email Productivity is clear: inboxes get quieter, important messages are easier to find, and users feel the difference right away.

Inside the SOC, the impact is just as valuable. When graymail no longer lands in the inbox, users spend less time sorting through clutter and security teams spend less time responding to the fallout. That translates into:

• Fewer low-value investigations

• Less filter maintenance

• Less time spent managing complaints and exceptions

• More room for proactive security work

At EAB, CISO Brian Markham saw Email Productivity dramatically cut the number of user-reported messages his team had to touch:

“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.”

EAB saw 1,927 employee hours saved on graymail in 90 days.

The goal is not just to make email cleaner. It is to create more room for meaningful security work. SOC leaders consistently use this recovered time to focus on higher-value efforts, including:

• Deepening investigations on the alerts that matter, applying context and judgment only human experts can provide instead of clearing queues

• Making risk-informed decisions, from whether to escalate an incident to how aggressively to respond

• Strengthening security posture, including identity controls, conditional access, and SaaS exposure

• Coordinating response across teams and stakeholders, where communication and timing are critical

Email Productivity supports that shift by eliminating a category of repetitive email work that doesn’t require analyst judgment in the first place. It helps lean SOC teams spend less time reacting to inbox clutter and more time on strategic initiatives that actually reduce risk.

Modern SOCs are under constant pressure to scale without burning out their people. The answer is not more dashboards, more tuning, or more manual review. It is autonomous systems that remove repetitive tasks and let analysts operate at a higher level.

Abnormal Email Productivity helps the SOC move toward automation of benign tasks by:

• Eliminating graymail triage as a day-to-day task for analysts

• Reducing the volume of user-reported messages that require human review

• Freeing IT and security teams from maintaining brittle rules and quarantines

• Giving executives, VIPs, and employees a focused inbox they actually trust

The result is a simpler experience for users, a significant number of hours returned to the SOC, and a stronger security culture bolstered by analysts freed for tasks that require human expertise.

See how Email Productivity can give your SOC hours back every week.