Users of Microsoft Office 365’s Outlook app may have noticed that their email folders have changed recently. The service has implemented a new ‘Clutter’ folder, which analyses your email activity, and files the messages it thinks you’re less likely to read into their own, separate folder.
You may find that this is actually less helpful than just leaving your inbox unbothered though. So if you would rather Outlook let you decide which emails are worth reading, here’s how to turn Clutter off for Office 365.
Although the desktop version of Outlook has Clutter functionality (provided you’re an Office 365 subscriber), the settings for changing it aren’t actually accessible through the software itself.
Instead, you’ll need to access Outlook’s web version. Sign in here, using your regular account credentials, and then navigate to the settings page by clicking the icon in the top right hand corner, and selecting ‘Options’ from the drop-down menu.
From there, navigate to the Clutter section, located under the ‘Mail’ and ‘Automatic processing’ tabs. If you want to turn the Clutter feature off altogether, uncheck the first box, labelled ‘Separate items identified as clutter’.
To just stop receiving the weekly updates informing you which messages have been designated as Clutter, uncheck the second box. To register your preferences, click the save button.
On the other hand, if you don’t like the way Clutter currently sorts your messages, one solution is simply to keep using it. Microsoft claims that the more you use it, the better it will get at knowing how to categorize your mail, so you could find yourself liking it more and more.
