Focused Inbox feature was first rolled out for the Outlook app for smartphones. Thereafter, the service became a part of Outlook on the web in October 2016 and then, it has been rolled out for Office 365 and Windows 10 Mail App. The Focused Inbox is basically a filter, not a folder that organizes all your emails into 2 categories – Focused and Others. Mails that matter to you most are displayed under the former while the less important ones are pushed to the latter.
Although great, Focused Inbox has become a controversial feature in a way that it uses a cloud-based service to sort your emails before jumping to your inbox. This functionality is rarely supported or encouraged by enterprises for security reasons. So, if you have some security concerns and do not want this feature to remain activated, here’s how to disable it.
Disable Focused Inbox in Windows 10 Mail App
By default, Focused Inbox feature is turned on. To disable it, do the following.
Launch the Windows 10 Mail app by clicking the Windows Start button and scroll down the apps list to locate ‘Mail App’.
If Focused Inbox feature is available for your app, a message about it will be visible to you as shown in the screenshot below.
Click on the hamburger icon, residing in the top left corner of the app window. Click the cog wheel (Settings) button at the bottom of the panel that slides out to open another panel on the right.
Next, chose the ‘Reading’ option. Scroll down and find the ‘Focused Inbox’ option.
Now, simply slide the bar to the ‘Off’ position.
The Focused Inbox feature is enabled for all Outlook and Office 365 accounts only. As such, the feature can’t be enabled for any other accounts like Gmail that have been added to the Mail app. The main reason that can be attributed to this limitation of the feature is that it is still rolling out in stages. Microsoft hasn’t completed the rollout of the feature yet. So, you might see the option in the Mail app but it might require a couple of more updates to actually start working. If you are still not seeing this option, a possible reason could be a service outage of popular services like Outlook and Skype.
See this post if you want to know how to Turn On Focused Inbox feature in Outlook.
