Don't Make a Gray Call With Your Email

Screaming at your TV after a questionable call by an official is part of what makes sports-viewing fun. It also makes sports-viewing excruciatingly stressful. Fact is, sometimes plays are just too ambiguous to call clearly. It's easy (not to mention therapeutic) to pile on the officials, but what isn't easy is having a job description that reads something like this: make split-second decisions constantly, then get pulverized from every conceivable angle if you make a mistake.

Detroit baseball fans remember back in 2010 when the umpire robbed their pitcher of a perfect game by calling the runner safe when the replay later showed he was out. Thanks to the 2001 AFC Divisional Playoff game, all football fans are now familiar with the super-obscure "Tuck Rule." And even non-soccer fans are familiar with " The Hand of God" play from the 1986 World Cup, in which everyone but the officials noticed that the Argentinian striker missed the ball with his head and punched it into the back of the net to beat England.

These tricky plays are sort of what graymail—all those newsletters, daily deals, and updates that fill your inbox —is like. Sure, signing up for those automated fantasy hockey updates back in September seemed like a good call at the time, but now they're getting in the way of your college basketball emails. Don't beat yourself up: Hotmail has implemented a host of new features to help you out with your Graymail-related quandaries (as illustrated by the sinister newsies in the video above).

For example, use "Sweep" to select a newsletter and have all of the emails from that sender sent to one folder (or straight to the trash). "Schedule Cleanup" lets you select outdated fantasy updates and gets rid of them. Hotmail also adds unsubscribe links to your subscriptions, so all you have to do is click once and the rest is taken care of. Head here to see everything that Hotmail can handle, then sign up and start making some good calls when it comes to Graymail. Don't worry—your bad calls have been forgiven. For now.