Focused Inbox feature was first rolled out for the Outlook app for smartphones. Thereafter, the service became a part of Outlook on the web and then, it has been rolled out for Office 365 and Windows 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 the 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 or Enable Focused Inbox in Windows Mail App
By default, the Focused Inbox feature is turned on. To disable it, do the following.
Launch the Windows Mail app by clicking the Windows Start button and scrolling down the apps list to locate ‘Mail App’.
If the 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 cogwheel (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.
See this post if you want to know how to Turn On or Off the Focused Inbox feature in Outlook.
