The dreaded focused inbox and what happened yesterday…

Last time I mentioned how confusing the weird things Outlook and Gmail do with your emails can be. Well, in a moment, I’ll tell you how you can turn it off.

But first, something that happened to me yesterday.

I was using my smartphone to look at something on the internet (eyeing up another gutar, truth be told, but don’t worry Julie if you’re reading this, I won’t buy it) when I started having trouble moving from one picture to another.

Normally you just swipe and it glides straight across. But now it was only moving a tiny bit, so to get it to move all the way across to the next picture I had to manically swipe again and again.

Luckily I’ve had the same issue before and know what’s going on. (It can happen on a tablet too – or even a laptop if you have a touch sensitive screen.)

You can also get something similar but not quite the same where it won’t scroll down a webpage properly… or where when you try to scroll it zooms in or out so everything gets bigger or smaller.

What’s usually happened is that a tiny bit of dirt has got onto the screen somehow (I blame the fact that I let Alastair and Edward play on it sometimes but it could be a tiny speck of food or even just some moisture from a cough). Then the phone thinks that’s a finger touching it and it gets confused, thinking you’re using two fingers at once to do something like zoom in.

The solution is simple: clean the screen. I turned the phone off (you could clean it with it turned on but you might end up confusing it even more as the dirt moves about) and used a clean dry cloth to wipe it a few times – while I was doing this I could feel the bit that was a bit dirty and made sure I polished that bit especially.

Then I turned it on again and it was back to normal.

You can get special screen cleaning wipes or sprays, but I just use a clean cloth or piece of kitchen roll.

Then I could get back to ogling the guitar… except it was dinner time so I had to put it down anyway!

More on Outlook emails and the dreaded Focused inbox
Last time I mentioned how confusing the Focused inbox could be – the one you get if you have an Outlook (or hotmail) email address.

Well, it’s possible to turn it off so you have a normal, old fashioned inbox where all your emails go (at least all the ones it doesn’t think are spam or junk).

You log into your outlook email address on the Outlook website. Then click or tap on the little cogwheel near the top right.

Then choose display settings and click or tap “Focused inbox” and then “Don’t sort messages”.

Then select “OK” and it should be done.

If you use the “Mail” app on Windows 10, you can change it from there instead.  Click on the little cog in the bottom left when you have your emails up and you should get a similar focused inbox setting you can turn off.

Then it won’t randomly pick which inbox to put each email into any more. It’s up to you, but if you have an Outlook or hotmail email address, I’d recommend turning Focused inbox off!

As I mentioned last time, the tabs it sorts emails into in Gmail do seem to work a bit better, but if you don’t like them, you can turn them off too. Log into Gmail on a web browser, then tap or click on the little plus sign to the right of the tabs. On the screen that appears, make sure the only one with a tick next to it is “primary” – if others have ticks, click or tap on them to get rid of it. Then choose Save and it’s done. But as I say, it works a bit better in Gmail anyway, so I’m not so sure whether it’s worth doing there – as always, it’s up to you!