Action Required by: January 31, 2020
Details: In July 2016 we announced that Focused Inbox, a new feature in Outlook that helps you cut through the noise of email to focus on what matters most, would be coming to Office 365 customers. Focused Inbox first rolled out to customers who use modern authentication, and earlier this month we added support for basic authentication. This means that Focused Inbox is now available to all Office 365 customers on the Monthly Channel of Office 365 Pro Plus. If you aren’t seeing it yet, be sure your Outlook version is updated to build 16.0.8730 Version 1711 or greater. Focused Inbox will be available to customers on the Semi-Annual Channel in the March 2018 Semi-Annual Targeted release, and the July 2018 Semi-Annual release, according to that channel’s standard schedule.
With Focused Inbox now rolled out, we’d like to share more about our plans for Clutter. As we mentioned in July, Focused Inbox is the long-term replacement for Clutter. It carries forward Clutter’s capabilities but removes the need to visit a separate folder to check your less-actionable messages. Because Clutter and Focused Inbox use the same algorithms for sorting messages, there are no changes to how email is classified, just a better user experience.
We’ll continue to make Clutter available to Office 365 customers until January 31, 2020. To prepare for Clutter’s eventual retirement, we’ve turned the feature off by default for new users. It’s also deactivated for those with extremely low usage (less than 12 emails per month being moved to the Clutter folder), however they can re-enable Clutter at any time, if desired.