Focused Inbox in Outlook 2016

With all the email we get daily, it would be nice to have Outlook separate email into categories of what’s important and what may be less important using machine learning. Based on a recent update to Outlook 2016, we now have that with the Focused Inbox. Here’s how it works…

In the Ribbon Bar, select View > Show Focused Inbox. When you do that, you’ll see two headers at the top of your Inbox (Focused and Other), and Outlook will make an educated guess as to what is important (and goes in the Focused Inbox) and what may be less important (like vendor emails). Those go in the Other Inbox.

In my Focused Inbox, I have emails from coworkers and other internal items:

My Other Inbox consists of email from vendors that might not be as important to me as other items that require action from coworkers:

If you have something in your Other Inbox that you’d like to have appear in your Focused Inbox, right click on the email in question. You can choose to either move that single email over to the Focused Inbox, or you can route everything from that email sender to the Focused Inbox:

Likewise, items coming into your Focused Inbox can be set to go to the Other Inbox, either for a single email or for that particular email sender: