Ahead of the release of their scheduled Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft is today releasing a handful of features to upgrade your mail and calendar experience. These are initially being made available to Outlook.com and Office 365 users, with a planned roll out for other providers in the coming weeks.
The Mail & Calendar app is the primary communication tool integrated within Windows 10. It eliminates the need for any other e-mail clients and provides you with a feature-packed offering. This first-party app is now being upgraded to include Focused Inbox, a feature which has been available for long on Outlook’s mobile app. And it even works with Gmail and Google Apps accounts on the mobile as well.
Under the said feature, the Windows 10 Mail app will segregate incoming emails into two separate categories. The important ones that beg our attention and interaction will now appear under the Focused tab while other less important ones such as newsletters will now be clubbed under the Others tab. This feature is enabled by default and can be toggled through the Settings>Reading option in the app.
Talking about the same, the official blog post reads,
What lands in your Focused tab is determined by an understanding of the people you interact with often, and the content of the email itself.
And since mentions have become a norm these days, Microsoft is adding the said capability to their Windows 10 Mail app as well. This feature will allow you to simply type @ and mention any contact right within an email conversation. The mentions in an email thread appear highlighted in blue and instructs the user to take action over the message. Also, mentioning a contact in an email also adds the user to the email conversation (by adding their email address in the To line).
The @ symbol appears in the message list for the messages you’ve been mentioned in, so you can see at a glance which emails require your action before you open them.
In addition to Mail, Microsoft has also introduced new features to make calendar appointments and scheduling less of a chore. It now allows you to overlay a variety of Calendars, a feature which has been adapted from Sunrise. It was the minimalistic calendar app that Microsoft acquired in 2015 and shuttered last year after merging some of its capabilities into Outlook. And now, it’s steadily rolling out more of those features to Windows 10.
Today, the Calendar app brings along the color-coded categories, Interesting Calendars and support for travel reservations or package deliveries. Firstly, colour coding your calendar events enables you to categorise them and stay on top of things. This feature allows you to quickly scan and visually associate similar events to focus on your work. Interesting Calendars is powered by Bing and enables you to keep track of TV schedules and your favourite game’s calendar events. It is an extension of the recent Holiday Calendar feature.
Interesting Calendars is powered by Bing and enables you to keep track of TV schedules and your favourite game’s calendar events. It is an extension of the recent Holiday Calendar feature and helps track when these important events are beginning. Further, one of the most useful features added today is the ability to display travel reservations and package delivery details. The creation of such an event in the calendar will now surface a useful summary card with a majority of details about your trip or package.
The Windows 10 Mail & Calendar app also brings along a few feature improvements. These can be checked out simply by updating the app through the Windows Store.
