Prioritize my inbox

Copilot reviews your emails as they arrive in your inbox and assigns a priority (high, low, normal) to them based on a list of factors—like people on the thread, their job titles, email content and more. Your emails will never be delayed as this process happens in parallel with mail delivery.

When you turn on the Prioritize feature in one place, like on your desktop, you'll see the feature working on all clients, including on your mobile.

Get started with Prioritize

To turn on Prioritize in Windows, select the arrow next to the Copilot button at the top right of the window, then select Prioritize from the menu that appears.

The Copilot menu in Outlook.

To turn it on in Mac, go to the What's New tab in the pane on the right, find Prioritize your mail and select Try it.

Shows the What's New tab in Outlook on Mac. There's a "Try it" link under "Prioritize your mail."

Note: If you don't see the Prioritize option, try again in a few days. This feature is being rolled out gradually.

From there Copilot walks you through turning on Prioritize. You'll need to give it at least one high priority instruction to get it started. For example:

It's from my manager
It's about a customer complaint

Any time you want to add more customizations, you can go to Settings.

Using Prioritize my inbox

Note: Copilot will prioritize emails which are received after the feature has been turned on; it doesn’t prioritize older, existing messages. It may take a little while to see new emails being prioritized.

Emails that Copilot deems as high priority will be marked with an up arrow in the message list. Copilot will lean towards marking emails where action is required from you as more important. You can also choose to have Copilot mark low priority emails with a down arrow.

Tip: The low priority icon is off by default but can be turned on in Settings > Copilot > Prioritize.

In your Message List, the first line of content from the email will be replaced with a brief summary of the message.

When you select a message, in the reading pane Copilot will automatically show a few lines of explanation and reasoning about why Copilot believes the message is important to you.

The mini summary and justification message for Copilot setting the priority to high for this email message.

The text can be expanded by clicking on the box to view more details.

Note: The system doesn't evaluate email delivered to a folder other than your Inbox (e.g., if you have a rule to send some mail to a subfolder). The system also doesn't evaluate mail marked as low importance by the sender, Out-of-Office mails, meeting mail (invites, declines, propose new times, etc.), mail you send to yourself (sender is the only recipient), mail with very little content, non-delivery receipt mail, quarantine messages, or encrypted messages where the content can't be seen.

In addition to seeing the high priority tag, you can sort or filter your inbox based on Copilot's priorities. Select the filter or sort controls at the top of the message list to choose the priority setting. That lets you filter your mail to show only high priority messages or sort your inbox so that items are grouped by high, normal and low priority.

The message filter menu in Outlook showing that High Priority is an option.

Teaching Copilot how you'd like mail to be prioritized

Copilot has a starting set of rules to help identify important mail but will do better if you customize it to your preferences and needs.

You can teach Copilot how to prioritize your mail by going to Settings > Copilot > Prioritize.

The Prioritize settings in Outlook. There you can tell Copilot what criteria you want it to use for prioritizing mail. For example, if it's from a certain person or company or if it's about certain topics or projects. Experiment a bit with different criteria to fine tune how Copilot prioritizes.

Tip: It does best with phrases ("it's from...", "mentions...", "contains...") instead of individual words.

Examples:

It’s an external email from a partner company
It’s about a GPU that I’m tracking the price on
It contains excessive jargon
It is about general updates
It is an automatic notification from Lakeshore Retail
It’s from Bellows College

Note: Any changes you make will be applied to email you receive in the future. Copilot does not go back and re-evaluate or change the priorities of mail you've already received.