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Microsoft will soon be rolling out Focused Inbox to all Outlook users

Mark Coppock
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Outlook’s Focused Inbox – Focus on the email that matters most.
Microsoft’s acquisition of the Acompli email app has only started to pay dividends for the company’s Windows 10 and Office users. A number of features from the popular iOS and Android apps have made their way over to the email app in Windows 10 and to Office 365, but quite a few remain unavailable.

One of the more popular features that has yet to make its way cross-platform is the Focused Inbox function, which uses some machine intelligence to email from important people and about vital topics in one prominent inbox tab. Focused Inbox is already available in the Outlook apps on iOS and Android, and Microsoft recently updated a blog post from July 26 giving us a timetable of when the feature will roll out everywhere else, as MSPU discovered.

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Specifically, according to the blog update, Office 365 First Release users will receive the Focused Inbox later this month, with a worldwide rollout being staged over the following four to six weeks. Office 365 Standard Release users, on the other hand, will start receiving the Focused Inbox in mid- to late November, with the worldwide rollout taking six to eight weeks.

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Once the feature has been turned on for them, users will start seeing their Focused Inbox in Outlook for Mac and the web right away, along with iOS and Android users. Outlook 2016 for Windows and Outlook for Windows 10 Mobile users will start seeing the feature in November.

The basic idea behind Focused Inbox is to let users to more clearly organize their inboxes by showing them which email is the most important in a single folder. Indeed, the feature is an advance on an older option titled Clutter, which had the same purpose but with less flexibility for the user and which will be turned off as Focused Inbox rolls out. Rather than moving unimportant email to a separate folder as with Clutter, Focused Inbox keeps all messages in a single folder designated by “Focused” and “Other” tabs.

If all of that seems overly complicated to you, then take heart. Focused Inbox is easily turned off in settings, and Office 365 administrators will have some control over which users receive the new feature.

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Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock
Computing Writer
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