Outlook.com’s Silly New Inbox and Customer Emails

Outlook.com, which is the online inbox for hotmail, msn, live, and outlook.com email addresses, has changed their inbox view to show two tabs– Focused and Other. They call this feature Focused Inbox and its creating issues for lots customers who think they aren’t getting their emails.

The new Focused inbox is specifically designed to hide transactional emails and newsletters from view in the Other tab. All emails generated by DPD and every other shopping cart on earth are by definition transactional emails, so our emails are being delivered to the Other tab of the inbox.

Because this feature is new, Outlook.com (and Hotmail, Live, whatever that uses Microsoft webmail) users have not yet learned that they need to look in their Other tab for transactional emails. This is leading customers to complain to vendors that they did not get their download links or can’t find their order emails.

DPD emails are being delivered to these customers and are being placed where Outlook.com wants them to be placed- in a useless hidden tab that nobody knows about. We are not being blocked for SPAM or for any other reason- this is how Outlook.com has been designed to work by the geniuses at Microsoft. There is nothing we or any other service can do about this (in our opinion stupid) behavior.

In an effort to educate Outlook.com users about how their weird new dual-inbox works, we’ve added the following notice to the DPD checkout if they use a Microsoft-owned email domain:

We hope this will help reduce support requests from Outlook.com email users in the future, but ultimately this decision was made by Outlook.com and we have no control over where they place our emails in their silly dual-inbox with a toggle switch thing.