If you get too many emails to handle, you'll soon have to find a way to manage without the help of Copilot. Microsoft plans to retire the Prioritize My Inbox feature in Outlook, which uses Copilot to organize your inbox.
The feature will be retired from all Outlook clients as part of a "cleanup effort" being made by Microsoft. The company explained the change through the Microsoft 365 Message Center (archived here).
The retirement process starts on October 26, 2026, and will continue gradually until the feature is completely rolled back by the end of March 2027.
The Prioritize My Inbox feature uses Copilot to study how you work and show you emails that are most important to your workflow. The tool surfaces relevant emails from your inbox based on your past behavior, but you can also use filters to adjust how content appears.
The feature is adaptive and context-aware, so it works in a fundamentally different way than Focused Inbox or other similar features. Prioritize My Inbox also supports personalized prompts that include an example of what you consider to be a high-priority email.
Microsoft appeared quite excited about the feature when unveiling it last year. Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital at the time, stated:
“Imagine if everybody could have their own assistant who screens and presents you with the most impactful actions. Prioritize My Inbox is sort of like having your own personal assistant. This can increase your responsiveness, generate time savings, focus your priorities, and help you to align to business-critical communications. It also offers relief by lowering the stress we feel when faced with a huge, unread inbox.”
Mark Stratford, a senior product manager at Microsoft, said the feature "revolutionizes email and where we will get to in the future."
Now, just over one year later, the feature is on the chopping block. Microsoft shared little about why the feature is being retired, apart from saying the rollback will help create a simpler Outlook Copilot experience.
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