FWIW, I've used a Hotmail account for over 3 years, and recently examined the Outlook.com "preview". I don't know which software you've had the opportunity to examine and review. The "conversion" to Outlook.com that I experienced only a few days ago did not have in evidence any of the four features that you have described, even to the extent that any one of them exists in Hotmail. The Outlook.com UI was so primitive that there was nothing gained by continuing to use it, and I exercised the option -- fortunately there is (or was) an option -- to return to using the Hotmail interface.
Also, I'm not so impressed by these features as you've described them. In my experience, any time that Microsoft's software does anything automatically, it is never for my benefit, but evidently for Microsoft's benefit. More to the point, I've yet to see a feature developed for that purpose configurable to serve my own. For example, the "Sweep" feature, in my experience with Hotmail, is obviously there to keep e-mail from accumulating on the MS e-mail servers. It is a rude, crude, "tool" that is not configurable in any way that serves my need to "get to the e-mail that you really want". Microsoft should realize that any e-mail that I "don't really want" is marked for future processing as junk mail by my own choice, not just by Microsoft's Hotmail server junk-mail filters.
Automatically sorting e-mail messages as you have described is not how I want to handle them. If I cannot turn that off or re-configure it, then I will be looking for an e-mail client with which I can download all of the raw, unprocessed, unread content, which would require a client that can use Exchange ActiveSync. Please see if you can find one of those and let us know.
