What Is Greymail?

Date First Published: 13th September 2023

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Network Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 6/10

CONTENTS

Characteristics
Where Did The Term Greymail Come From?

Learn about what greymail is in this article.

Greymail is a type of email that falls in between useful and spam emails. They are generally unwanted, but are solicited and not considered spam. However, the recipient's interest in the email tends to reduce over time, increasing the chances that they will consider it to be spam. Greymail messages usually serve little to no purpose to the recipient.

Marketers should identify their content being tagged as graymail. This can be a sign that they need to improve their customer segmentation, personalisation, and engagement.

Characteristics

Greymail is different to spam and desirable mail and can be identified by the following characteristics below:

Solicited - The recipient requested to receive the email message by directly or indirectly opting in. For example, a direct method is subscribing to a newsletter. An indirect method is the recipient providing their email address when they signed up for a shopping site. With greymail, recipients give their permission to receive emails, usually intentionally, but sometimes accidentally.
Legitimate - Greymail messages are sent by reputable sources who value their relationship with the recipient. The message is often truthful and will usually contain an unsubscribe option. On the other hand, spam messages will often have no unsubscribe button and may be deceptive and sometimes malicious, but not always.
Content value. Greymail messages generally contain content that is specific to the recipient's interests. This is unlike spam messages which contain unwanted offers and information that the recipients may have no interest in. The main characteristic of spam is that it is unsolicited, meaning that the recipient did not ask to be emailed or have any previous relationship with the sender.

Where Did The Term Greymail Come From?

The term 'greymail' was officially introduced by the Microsoft Hotmail team in 2011. The company introduced new methods of filtering incoming messages. However, the term has been described before that. Greymail was described in 2007 and 2008 by researchers at Microsoft Research looking to improve spam filtering as "messages that could reasonably be considered either spam or good by different email users".