Sort Email

When you have a lot of emails coming in, Outlook gives you a few different ways to sort and filter your inbox.

Enable Focused Inbox

If your organization's email service supports it, you can use the Focused Inbox. This tries to separate important emails from less-important ones.

1. Click the View tab.
2. Click the Show Focused Inbox button.
   

The inbox is sorted into two groups, Focused and Other. Outlook will sort emails from people you email frequently into the Focused inbox, while sorting emails from other people, and automatically-generated email notifications, into the Other inbox. It will also learn your habits over time.

Switch Between Focused and Other

1. Click Focused or Other at the top of the inbox to switch to that view.
   

Move Email Between Focused and Other

If an email was sorted into the wrong inbox, you can move it to the correct one. This will also help train Outlook to sort future emails better.

1. Right-click an email.
2. Select Move to Focused (or Other), or Always Move to Focused (or Other).

   Selecting Move to Focused will move the selected email to Focused, while selecting Always Move to Focused will move every email from the sender to Focused every time.

   

Disable Focused Inbox

If you'd rather view all of your email at once, instead of separated by the Focused Inbox, you can switch back.

1. Click the Show Focused Inbox button.
   

Filter by Read Status

If you’ve disabled Focused Inbox, there’s a simple option for toggling between all your emails and just your unread emails.

1. Click Unread to view only unread mail.
2. Click All to view all mail.
   

Sort Email

While emails are usually sorted by date, with the most-recent email appearing at the top, you can sort them by another criteria instead.

1. Click the list arrow next to the sort criteria.

   A menu appears with various sort options.

2. Select the sort criteria.
   

   The email in the inbox is sorted by the selected critera.

Advanced Sort

If the criteria in the Sort menu aren't quite what you're looking for, or you'd rather sort by multiple criteria at once, you can use Outlook's advanced sort feature.

1. Click the View tab.
2. Expand the Current View group, if necessary.
3. Click the View Settings button.
4. Click Sort.

   The Sort dialog box appears.

   From here, you can choose multiple sort criteria and select either Ascending or Descending order.

   

5. Change the sort settings.
6. Click OK, then click OK again.