How to Turn On/Off Focused Inbox feature in Outlook

Email sorting can be a daunting task for disorganized individuals, but most email services offer an option to refine and organize email messages by importance. Focused Inbox is one such refinement and improvement feature rolled out by Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com, and Outlook on The Web customers.

The purpose of this feature is to move unimportant items to a separate folder – ‘Other’ – so Outlook customers can focus on the most important items in their inbox. Here’s how to enable Focused Inbox in Outlook.

Turn On or Off Focused Inbox in Outlook

The “Outlook” mail client includes a feature called “Focused Inbox.” To turn on this feature: Open Outlook. On the View tab of the ribbon interface, find and choose the Show Focused Inbox option.

The “Focused and Other” tabs should be visible when you open Outlook. If you have any unread messages, Outlook will notify you. You can decide whether to keep the message in your “Focused Inbox” or “Other” tab, or you can switch between tabs at any time.

You can configure these settings by right-clicking a message in your Inbox and selecting ‘Move to Focused’ or ‘Move to Another’.

If you want to move the message from the Focused tab to the other tab, select “Move to Other.” This works only for a selected message. If you want all future messages from the sender to be delivered to the other tab, select “Always Move to Other.”

For moving messages from Other to Focused, choose ‘Move to Focused’ and ‘Always Move to Focused’ for all future messages to be delivered to the Focused tab.

Please note that Focused Inbox is being rolled out in a staged manner in accordance with the change management policies for Office 365. If you receive a This setting can’t be applied to any of your accounts message, do not get disappointed. It should be available to you, soon.

Enable Focused Inbox in Outlook.com & Outlook on the Web

The process for Outlook.com and Outlook on the Web is similar. For Outlook on the Web, go to ‘Settings’> Display settings > Focused Inbox. Under the ‘When an email is received’ menu, select ‘Sort messages into Focused and Other. This will instantly create the Focused and Other tabs, as shown in the screenshots below.

From there, you can configure other options related to the feature.

Microsoft has announced that updates to the different stages of the Office 365 Public rollout will be announced on the Office 365 Public Road map, and more detailed information will be communicated via the Office 365 Message Center.

Microsoft Outlook.com has released a new feature called Focused Inbox. This new feature sorts your emails into two different sections: Focused and Other. Your most important emails will appear in the Focused section while the rest will appear in the other section. You can customize which emails appear in which section. You can also choose to not have any emails sorted into the Focused section. This can be done by going to the Gear Icon at the top right, choosing Display Settings, and then selecting the Focused Inbox link from the pull-down menu and clicking on the Don’t Sort Messages option.