Microsoft Outlook sorts your emails in the Inbox into "Focused" and "Other" views. This feature helps you focus on the messages that matter and decreases the amount of email clutter. Although the sorting usually works well, an important message may sometimes end up in the "Other" view. It is recommended that you check this view from time to time to ensure that nothing important goes unnoticed.

 

What are the "Focused" and "Other" views? What is the difference between them?

Outlook sorts incoming emails into these two views.

The “Focused” view includes messages that are likely to be relevant to you. These include, for example, personal messages, important conversations, and messages from contacts you frequently communicate with.

The “Other” view contains less urgent messages. These include newsletters, notifications, and automated messages.

 

How does sorting work?

Outlook uses automatic sorting that learns from your usage behavior. For example, it takes note of which messages you read and reply to, who you frequently receive messages from, and which messages you move between folders. The more you use Outlook, the better the sorting works. You can fine-tune the sorting to suit your needs by moving messages between views, which helps Outlook learn to sort messages more effectively in the future.

In Outlook, you can move email messages between views by selecting the email you want to move, right-clicking it, and choosing "Move to the Focused/or Other folder."

 

You can also turn the feature off:

If you don't want to use sorting, you can remove the "Focused/Other" view from Outlook's settings. This will display all messages in a single list.

Outlook (Classic):

In the Outlook desktop app, you can remove the sorting by going to the toolbar, selecting "View," and then "Show Focused Inbox".

 

Outlook (Web and New Outlook):

In the New Outlook desktop app or the web version of Outlook, you can turn off sorting by going to your email settings, then "Mail," "Layout," and "Don't sort my messages".