From the course: Outlook Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

Read mail and use the Focused Inbox - Outlook Tutorial

From the course: Outlook Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

Read mail and use the Focused Inbox

- [instructor] Let's read our mail. The first thing you need to do is make sure you're in the mailbox. And don't forget, you can get there by clicking the Mail icon on the top left hand side of the screen. I will also click to expand the navigation pane. Remember, we have two different mail accounts. The currently selected folder that you're in is highlighted on the left hand side, so right now I'm in the inbox of my Red30 Tech Microsoft 365 account. I have another email account that I use with Outlook, and I can access that inbox by clicking on it directly in this navigation folder pane. Or don't forget, I also put it in my favorites right here at the top of the screen. So, from left to right, I have the navigation pane with all my folders, I have the contents of the currently selected folder in the middle of the screen, and I can preview the contents of the currently selected email on the right. I can change the width of any of these panes by hovering my mouse over the vertical lines and clicking and dragging to make it wider or more narrow. In fact, I can also do that with the pane on the left hand side. In the folder list, I can see that certain folders have numbers next to them in blue. This tells me how many unread items each folder has. You'll see that each email account has a different amount of unread mail. I can see which ones are unread because they're blue and they have that blue bar next to them. I can click on an email, read a preview on the right hand side, and as soon as I click away, the blue bar goes away, and now the message is marked as having been read and I can move on. Occasionally, you'll get a message, such as this one, that to protect your privacy and to be more safe, Outlook will block automatic downloading of some content. At the top of the screen, you can see what to do with these messages. For example, you can trust the content entirely and those images will never be blocked again, or just for one time use you can click Show blocked content if you determine that the email is safe. The messages will download and your email will look correct. Now, I'm going to head over to my Gmail account for a moment. If I click inbox, you'll notice that you don't see that Focused inbox here. Gmail can, in fact, have a Focused inbox. It's in settings. I'm going to show you how to activate that in the next video when we talk about customizing the inbox. But let's go back to the Red30 Tech Microsoft 365 inbox for now. This one does use that Focused inbox. This means that Outlook determines what emails it thinks are very important and will put those in the focused inbox, everything else is in this tab called Other. So, if you're looking for an email and you can't find it, you can always come over to the Other tab and see what's here. You can train Outlook what's Other and what's Focused. If something isn't Other and should be Focused, you can right-click on that email, hover your mouse over Move and choose Move to Focused inbox. You can choose to always move it to Focused, it just depends on if you want that one particular message in Focused or if you want every email every time from that person to move. I'll click Yes and the message will get moved to Focused. Alternatively, if something comes to Focused and it's just not that important, you can move it to Other. So, that's how you can train Outlook while you're reading your email. Finally, on the left hand side, I want to remind you that you can change these favorites. In fact, you can move them around, you can click and drag with your mouse and rearrange the order of them. You can add things to favorites at any time by right-clicking on a folder, any folder, it doesn't have to be Inbox, you can choose Add to Favorites and it'll be brought in here and you can move them around some more. And if I decide I don't want it anymore, I can right-click on any folder in Favorites and choose Remove from Favorites. It's going to put it right back where it was. Now, it's up to you if you want to leave this navigation pane open or not. I can choose to hide it, that's how I prefer to work, but there's no right or wrong. And this sets us up very nicely for the next video, which is how to customize the inbox.

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