Focused Inbox vs Clutter (more junk in my primary inbox)

Silver Contributor

So it appears that Focused Inbox may have rolled out to our tenant

 

Nothing is going into Clutter anymore.  A ton of stuff that has previously been filtered into my clutter folder is now sitting in my primary inbox.

 

So until an Outlook client update for Focused Inbox gets rolled out, does this mean that I will get a bunch of junk in my primary inbox?

 

It I look at it in OWA or mobile Outlook, for the most part it seems to do ok, but I do see stuff that I expect to not be in focused inbox in my main inbox there as well.  

14 Replies

Yeah got the same feeling if it would work like cluter i would not get the pings everytime a cluter(non focused) message would arrive now it still tries to get my focus...

This is what we were concerned about, Focused Inbox rolling out before the Office client update is released.   Microsoft didn't see this as a big problem at the time:

 

"So if you do that before the release on Windows desktop, you will then see emails that previously went to Clutter going to your inbox. We don't expect many users will go that route, since the numbers of people who move between Web/Windows/Mac is very small." 

 

Can you turn off FI and go back to Clutter for the time being, does it work that way? From a previous thread - 

 

Steps to re-enable Clutter (for admin)

 

As an Office 365 admin, you can re-enable Clutter using Exchange PowerShell. Once this is done, Focused Inbox will be turned off and Clutter will be active again.

 

Turn Clutter on using Exchange PowerShell

  1. You can enable Clutter manually for a mailbox by running the Set-Clutter cmdlet. You can also view Clutter settings for mailboxes in your organization by running the Get-Clutter cmdlet.
  2. Example: Turn on Clutter for a single user named Allie Bellew:   Set-Clutter -Identity “Allie Bellew” -Enable $true

what is the holdup anyway with the Outlook 2016 client update? Were there some issues?

I remember having FI last year for outlook on the web (in first release) and it then being pulled back until recently.


@Ivan Unger wrote:

what is the holdup anyway with the Outlook 2016 client update? Were there some issues?

I don't think that has been disclosed, this is the last we heard back from Jan -

 

"While we have completed the Focused Inbox feature, we still have some work to complete to deliver the update to Outlook 2016 for Windows. We will update this blog again when we have an updated launch date."

 

It would be great if we could get an update on this situation, as now people are running into this.

@Cian Allner i already have a focused inbox on the mac and before i had focused inbox on android but since i have the focused inbox on the mac the issue of all mail pings was not present since the focused inbox on the mac i have the issue

This is pretty ridiculous.

We arent able to tell which users had Clutter and which didnt because IsEnabled is set automatically to false for everyone.

So now we have to turn it on for everyone regardless if they had it turned off or on before.

Rolling this out without the client supported is irresponsible, and now I'm getting slammed with "why's" from our users.
Bloody hell, its not even on for everyone. Some users still have clutter, and some have focused inbox. My boss had focused inbox yesterday, but now clutter is back.

Some kind of phased rollout

That sounds really awkward, to say the least.! I'd be turning off Focused Inbox in my tenant if it was running amok if it meant everyone went back to how they were.  Makes support impossible and hurts credibility.

 

Have you opened a support call yet? I would be escalating this, the best you can. It would be great if we could get some clarity here.  I don't understand why the Focused Inbox rollout has been this problematic, going back eight months now.

Ya, for what it is worth, I just opened a premier ticket to see if they will be able to tell us anything.

I'm all for it, and it seems to work fine in OWA and Mobile, but *MOST* of our users rely on Outlook client and the built-in native iphone/android apps, so they'll be pretty screwed when it formally rolls out to everyone.

I actually really liked the fact that clutter stuck it in another folder. Our users are pretty disappointed in this new approach so far, though I realize it is where all of the rest of services are going I think.
Hopefully this is a temporary situation and all the pieces will start to fit into place soon. I'll be interested in what you can get out of premier support, a few answers would be good.
Pretty super useless reply...

"I’d really like to be able to give you definitive answers to all of the questions, but unfortunately at this moment I don’t have good answers available to me or to you."

With a link to the Focused Inbox blog announcement and mentioning the PowerShell scripts to try and turn Clutter back on.

Hopefully some followup messages will lead to some useful escalation.

+1 on super useless.  Clutter took getting used to, but I have users accross multiple tenants that became reliant on it.  Nearly all of these users each use Outlook via iPhone/Android, Web, and Windows at different points in the day (despite what MS says in the quote mentioned above), so even though "Focused" and "Clutter" weren't in sync, they usually agreed with eachother and kept their inboxes at bay.

 

With this change, Outlook on Windows, where they spend most of the day, has almost become unusable due to the previously reliance on the clutter feature & is drastically different than iPhone/Android and web.

 

What in the world is going on here?  I would expect this from a startup or a young product, but Outlook?  Personally, my PC's Office 2016 installation is on the first release track and I have seen Outlook rev frequently recently with pretty noticible UI changes with no end date in site. (the latest is the weirdest yet - Version 1704 Build 8001)

 

 

Does anybody have some concrete info on what MS is doing to solve this problem and what the timeline is?

I am so frustrated with the new focused inbox.  My mail on my ipad and iphone is catching every piece of email that comes in.  So now, I feel my whole inbox is junk mail.  This is crazy and I'd like to learn in layman terms how to turn clutter back on.  

completely agree.