The Spark Team 
Smart. Focused. Email.
Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Definition
💡 Focused inbox: Outlook's feature that splits your inbox into two tabs, Focused and Other, so the messages Outlook thinks matter most sit apart from everything else. It's on by default for most Outlook accounts. If you've ever opened Outlook and seen "Focused" and "Other" sitting above your message list, that's this.
How Outlook decides what counts as Focused
Outlook uses machine learning to guess which senders and messages you actually care about, based on who you've replied to, what you've opened, and what you've ignored. Personal correspondence and messages from people you interact with regularly tend to land in Focused. Newsletters, automated notifications, and mail from senders you rarely engage with get pushed to Other.
It's a reasonable first guess. But it's also just a guess, and Outlook gets it wrong often enough that you shouldn't treat Focused as a complete inbox on its own. An important email from a new client, someone Outlook has no history with yet, can easily land in Other on the first try.
One limitation worth knowing upfront: Focused Inbox only sorts your main inbox. It doesn't touch other folders. And it won't work at all on a shared mailbox. That's by design on Microsoft's end, not a bug.
Teaching Focused Inbox to get it right
The good news is Focused Inbox learns from you, not just from generic patterns. If something lands in Other and it shouldn't have, right-click it and move it to Focused. Do this consistently for a sender, and Outlook starts routing their future messages to Focused on its own. It gets better the more you correct it.
The same works in reverse. Newsletter keeps sneaking into Focused? Move it to Other and select the option to always send that sender there going forward.
This is closer to a manual email filter you train over time than a set-and-forget rule. It takes a few corrections before it settles into something reliable for your particular inbox.
Turning Focused Inbox on or off
Steps vary slightly depending on which version of Outlook you're using.
In Outlook.com or Outlook on the web:
- Select Settings.
- Go to Mail > Layout.
- Under Focused Inbox, choose "Sort messages into Focused and Other" to turn it on, or "Don't sort my messages" to turn it off.
In classic Outlook for Windows:
- Go to the View tab.
- Select Show Focused Inbox to toggle it on or off.
In Outlook for Mac:
- Open the View tab.
- Select Turn on Focused Inbox or Turn off Focused Inbox.
On Outlook mobile (iOS/Android):
- Tap Inbox at the top, then Settings.
- Tap Mail, then toggle Focused Inbox off.
If your version doesn't match these steps exactly, Microsoft's Focused Inbox support page keeps current instructions for every Outlook variant.
When Focused Inbox isn't enough
Spark's approach to the same problem.
Focused Inbox is a solid idea with a narrow scope: one account, two buckets, a guess based on who you've replied to before. It doesn't know what's genuinely urgent, and it can't see anything happening in your other inboxes.
Spark takes a wider swing at the same goal. Its Smart Inbox sorts mail into more useful groups than just "important" and "everything else," and it works across every account you've connected, not just one. Priority senders keep the people who actually matter at the top regardless of which inbox they wrote to, and a Gatekeeper screens unfamiliar senders before they ever reach you, rather than sorting them after the fact — this works in Smart Inbox's Focused List view (its other view, Unread Cards, doesn't support Gatekeeper). It's the same instinct behind Focused Inbox, applied to your whole inbox setup instead of one account at a time.