Forum Discussion
Focused Inbox not working
Update: On Friday, Microsoft had me disable all of my inbox rules, just to make sure that none of those were interfering with Focused Inbox processing. They're also suspicious of our Ironport appliances and how they may be altering incoming mail, but that doesn't really make sense to me, since Focused Inbox is working normally for a co-worker and his mail goes through the same appliance. It will modify the Subject line to flag certain messages as "Marketing" or "Potential Spam", but it's been doing that all along, including back when Focused Inbox processing was working properly for me. The latest word is that I sent them a few sample emails that went to the Focused tab but should have gone to the Other tab, and I'm waiting for their feedback. As of this morning, I'd say it's half-working. Of the two dozen emails I've received that are not important (spam or bulk emails that got past the Ironport's filters), about half have gone to the Other tab and the rest showed up in the Focused tab. I even went so far as to clear out my safe senders and safe recipients lists (did that on Monday, actually).
In my opinion (which I may have mentioned before) the Focused Inbox "learning" process needs to have a reset switch that clears out everything and let's it start learning from scratch again. I don't want to have to do this sort of troubleshooting for any of our end users. I was very impressed with how well Clutter worked, but my transition to Focused Inbox has not been a pleasant experience. And I really miss my inbox rules, many of which moved messages into custom folders and kept my inbox pretty clean. I guess that's the price of being an early adopter.
I solved my problem this way.
Logged into the webmail interface for Outlook(Office 365).
Navigate to options>Mail>Layout>Focused Inbox.
For some unknown reason my radio button had been set to "Don't Sort Messages". I flipped it back to "Sort Messages into Focused and Other".
- Kevin DurhamJul 14, 2018Copper Contributor
I have the same problem, everything was working without issue ever since focused Inbox was introduced, then one or two days ago it just stopped working. everything in options is set to sort by focused inbox, Outlook has forgotten or stopped understanding what a focused/ other email is. I have tried all that I can from a user point of view as I am not an admin on our exchange.
Any Other ideas or help?
- TimBal63May 20, 2019Copper Contributor
Kevin DurhamI'll assume this has been resolved on your end since it's been almost a year. The only solution that works is to create a new profile. Nothing else seems to work.
- MatthewMcDonald_ewsFeb 14, 2024Brass ContributorNecropost, but has anyone ever found a proper solution to this? My Focused Inbox has been working flawlessly for a few years now, but all of a sudden it's gotten flaky. Messages it was throwing into other per my request are no longer going there, while others do. Also sometimes I'll see one of the messages in Focused but if I switch to Other it displays there as well and if I go back to Focused, it's gone from there, like the view is messed up.