• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, April 19, 2010

CAPTIVA ISLAND, Fla. -- As Microsoft conducts research into improving the experience for the Hotmail user, some surprising findings have emerged that should be a boon for email marketers. People are using their inboxes more for commercial purposes than personal ones.

In a behavioral survey, the top three reasons people said they use email were: shopping online and conducting transactions; receiving billing statements and managing related accounts; and communicating with businesses in a way that allows privacy.

"The top three things were actually related to commercial email ... that surprised us, that's the first time we've seen that," said Dan Lewis, a senior product manager on Hotmail, at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit on Monday.

Realizing that business-related email has become so prominent poses a set of challenges related to spam, which Microsoft is grappling with. Lewis used an example of an REI customer who used to receive emails about hiking. But he has since stopped hiking and has begun marking the messages as junk.

That can impact how Hotmail's filtering system perceives emails from REI. Microsoft is looking to hit the sweet spot, allowing people to block personal spam in a way that doesn't hurt a company's ability to deliver emails throughout Hotmail.

"How do we make sure the email that's coming in is the email they want -- and also that we're not damaging the sender's reputation, we're not hurting that ecosystem?" Lewis said. "Those things need to be defined separately. Our customers should have the easy option for achieving that outcome without necessarily impacting the reputation of the sender."

Separately, Lewis was joined on a panel at the Summit by Carlo Catajan, a product manager at Yahoo Mail. Both suggested that major email providers, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail, work together to establish standards on fighting spam that can benefit companies.

"I do think there will be convergence in how we implement these features going forward," Catajan said.

Lewis said Hotmail is not aggressively looking for ways to meld social-media functions within an inbox. He indicated that research shows that as much time as people are spending with Twitter and Facebook, they want separation and less clutter. That could be a trouble spot for Facebook if it tries to launch an email service, said Lewis.

"We're not going to think about the inbox as really a social inbox for now," he said.

Catajan said Yahoo is taking a different tack as it explores ways to weave social media and interactive functions into messages. The goal would be to establish "a more dynamic template, where users can interact directly within the email message." He suggested a person could rate a movie watched on Netflix without leaving the inbox.