How to disable clutter in Exchange by Bas Wijdenes

Disable the clutter in Office 365 first things first.

The clutter divides your incoming mails in two. The first tab is for ‘important’ mail and the second is for the ‘less important’ mails.

Unfortunately, the decision that Microsoft makes for you is not always correct. Users sometimes complain that they have not received an important e-mail and we find it in the clutter. For that reason, we have disabled the clutter with most of our clients.

The tutorial is primarily intended for system administrators who know PowerShell. The tutorial is based on Exchange Online, but the same applies to Exchange On-premise.

For end-users who want to disable their clutter themselves, click here.


Log in to Exchange Online with PowerShell.

As the title says, first things first, before we can remove the clutter from your end-user’s inboxes we’ll need to log on Exchange Online with PowerShell.

Open PowerShell (preferable PowerShell_ISE) and copy/paste the following script.

$Cred365 = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred365 -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Import-PSSession $Session

Run it and log on to Exchange Online with your Global Admin credentials.


Let’s disable the clutter divided in 2 parts.

Part 1: disabling the clutter for 1 user.

If you want to disable the clutter for one use you can use the following command:

Set-Clutter -Identity [email protected] -Enable $false

If you want to enable the clutter again, you can run the command again with -Enable $true:

Set-Clutter -Identity [email protected] -Enable $true

Part 2: Disabling the clutter for everyone in your Office 365 tenant.

If you want the clutter to be disabled for everyone within your tenant, you can use the following command:

Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Set-Clutter -enable $false

If you want to enable the clutter for everyone, you can change the -enable $false to -enable $true:

Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Set-Clutter -enable $true

Turning off the clutter for a specific group of users.

To go one step further. If you want to disable the clutter for anyone with a specific domain name you can use the following command. Please note that you do need to adjust DOMAIN.COM to the correct address.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Where-Object {($_.PrimarySMTPAddress -like "*DOMAIN.COM*") } | Set-Clutter –enable $false

You can adjust the $_.PrimarySmtpAddress to other parameters such as the department or something like this.

To go one step further, just to give an example, you can also search for the PrimairySmtpAddress and EmailAddresses. See the command below:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Where-Object {($_.PrimarySMTPAddress -like "*DOMAIN.COM*") -or ($_.EmailAddresses -like "*DOMAIN.COM*")} | Set-Clutter –enable $false

Summary

If you need help with another command, you can indicate this in the comments and I will try to help you.
Do you have any other questions or comments? Then you can also leave this in the comments.

The post was reviewed on 3 July 2018 and the content is still relevant. I have made some adjustments to the text.


A little extra

This post contains PowerShell. Would you like to learn the basics better? I have created a new website to learn basic PowerShell in an ’emulator’ environment.
Click here to go learn Basic PowerShell.

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Bas Wijdenes

My name is Bas Wijdenes and I work as a PowerShell DevOps Engineer. In my spare time I write about interesting stuff that I encounter during my work.

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