The downside is that your inbox is that historical record. The second method is a little faster, and you get an historical record of all your email. Instead of trying to clear the inbox of messages, these users are trying to clear it of unread marks. This second technique relies on unread marks. Their goal is to make their inbox empty by assessing or reading email and deleting as they go.Ī smaller group doesn't bother to delete the messages they've already read or skipped. One way of handling it, known as Inbox Zero, nearly approaches a religion for some people. There are two basic strategies for managing your inbox. But if you take that knowledge and leverage Outlook's complexity and power to your advantage, you can boost your inbox management productivity significantly. Only you know what mail is important to you. No algorithm or set of built-in rules from Microsoft is going to solve the inbox overload problem that many business users face. For some users, self-discipline may be the thing that's most needed. Whatever you call it, this functionality is a step in the right direction, but it falls well short of what most users really need. (Microsoft shrewdly implemented Focused Inbox as a view instead of as a mailbox. The difference between them is more marketing than programming. This is little more than Clutter inverted so that it highlights mail you want to see instead of mail you probably don't want to see. More recently, Microsoft rolled out a feature called the Focused Inbox. Clutter was not well received because users were not given a way to fully remove it. It started by introducing to Office 365 subscribers a feature called Clutter, an automated filtering tool that put emails you were unlikely to open (based on your past behavior) into a separate folder.

To be fair, Microsoft has been trying to address the overwhelmed-inbox condition for the last couple of years. This article focuses on making inbox management much more productive. I've decided to tackle Outlook's annoyances head on. When I think about why I hate the software, it comes down to a set of frustrations around key areas like a lack of focus on inbox management, a tacked-on search facility with a terrible user interface, and the absence of two-way syncing with non-Microsoft sources of calendars and contacts. But in the Windows environment, there's no better email, calendaring and contacts package than Microsoft Outlook 2016.

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