Summary

The Outlook mobile app ships with defaults chosen for the average of everybody, which suits almost nobody. This article shows you how to set what a swipe does in each direction, merge or keep the Focused Inbox split, control which account is allowed to interrupt you, and schedule quiet hours — the settings that turn a phone inbox from a source of noise into something you can clear at a bus stop.

In this guide

• 1. Open Outlook's Settings on Your Phone
• 2. Assign Your Left and Right Swipe Actions
• 3. Choose Archive Instead of Delete
• 4. Turn Focused Inbox On or Off
• 5. Choose Which Account Notifies You
• 6. Set a Do Not Disturb Schedule for Work Hours
• 7. Fix the Signature and the Extras Worth a Minute

Before You Start

• The Outlook mobile app already installed and signed in. If you are starting from scratch, work through How to Set Up the Outlook Mobile App first and come back here.
• No admin rights required. Every setting in this guide is yours to change.

Instructions

1. Open Outlook's Settings on Your Phone

Every setting below starts from the same screen, and it is not where most people look for it.

1. Open the Outlook app and tap your profile picture in the top-left corner of the inbox. A panel slides in from the left showing your accounts and folders.
2. Tap the gear icon at the bottom of that panel. On some builds it sits at the bottom-left, beside a question-mark icon.
3. The Settings screen opens. Your accounts are listed at the top under Mail Accounts; everything else sits below, grouped under headings including Mail, Calendar and Preferences.

Verification: You are on the right screen if you can see a row labelled Swipe options under the Mail heading. On older builds this heading reads Mail and the row reads Swipe Options — the capitalisation varies, the location does not.

2. Assign Your Left and Right Swipe Actions

This is the setting that saves the most time. Each direction gets one action, and it applies to every account in the app.

1. On the Settings screen, tap Swipe options under Mail.
2. The screen shows two rows — Swipe right and Swipe left — each displaying the action currently assigned to it. The names describe the direction your finger travels, not the side of the screen the message moves toward.
3. Tap Swipe right. A list of available actions appears:
   • None — disables the gesture in that direction.
   • Delete — sends the message to Deleted Items.
   • Archive — moves it to the Archive folder.
   • Move — opens a folder picker so you can file it.
   • Flag — marks it for follow-up.
   • Mark read — clears the unread state without opening it. Some builds offer Read & Archive, which does both in one gesture.
   • Snooze — hides the message and returns it to the top of the inbox at a time you choose. On some Android builds this is labelled Schedule.
4. Tap the action you want. The list closes and the Swipe right row updates to show your choice.
5. Tap Swipe left and repeat.
6. Tap the back arrow at the top-left to return to Settings, then close Settings.

Verification: Go back to the inbox and drag a message slowly to the right. A coloured panel appears behind it showing the icon and name of the action you assigned. Let go and the action runs; drag back to the start and nothing happens.

Tip: Swipe part of the way and hold. The panel appears with the action name on it before you commit, which is a useful way to confirm you assigned the direction you meant without losing a real message to the test.

3. Choose Archive Instead of Delete

Outlook mobile ships with Delete on one of the swipes on most installs. Change it. This is the single highest-value edit on the whole settings screen.

Archive and Delete both clear a message out of the inbox in one gesture. What happens next is different:

• Archive moves the message to the Archive folder, where it stays until you go looking for it. Search finds it. Nothing expires it.
• Delete moves it to Deleted Items, which most organisations empty automatically after a set period — 30 days is common, and some policies are shorter. After that the message is genuinely gone.

Phones are where accidental swipes happen: one-handed, on a train, half-watching the screen. With Archive assigned, an accidental swipe costs you three seconds of searching. With Delete assigned, it costs you a message you might not realise is missing until a policy has already purged it.

The pairing worth copying: Archive in one direction, Snooze in the other. Archive handles everything you have finished with; Snooze handles everything you cannot act on until later, without leaving it sitting unread as a reminder.

To find archived mail on the phone: tap your profile picture, tap the account name to expand its folder list, and tap Archive. It is the same folder that appears in Outlook on your computer, so anything you archive on the phone is on your desktop within seconds. For clearing out a large backlog rather than one message at a time, see How to Archive Old Emails in Outlook.

4. Turn Focused Inbox On or Off

Focused Inbox splits your mail into two tabs, Focused and Other, and puts what it judges to be important in the first. On a small screen the split is divisive: some people find it halves the noise, others miss messages that landed in Other and never look there again.

1. On the Settings screen, find the Focused Inbox row under the Mail heading.
2. Turn the toggle off to merge everything into one inbox. Turn it on to restore the two tabs.
3. Return to the inbox. With the toggle off, the Focused and Other tabs at the top of the message list disappear and all mail appears in one chronological list.

Note: This setting belongs to the account, not the phone. Switching Focused Inbox off in the mobile app also switches it off in Outlook on your computer and on Outlook on the web. If you want the tabs on your desktop but not your phone, that combination is not available — pick one behaviour for the account.

If you keep it on, train it rather than fighting it: open a message in the wrong tab, tap the three dots at the top right, and choose Move to Focused or Move to Other, then Always move to Focused or Always move to Other when prompted. How to Use Focused Inbox in Outlook covers how the sorting decides.

5. Choose Which Account Notifies You

If you have a work account and a personal account in the same app, this is what stops one waking you up on behalf of the other.

1. On the Settings screen, tap Notifications under the Mail heading.
2. Under Mail notifications, choose what generates an alert:
   • All — every incoming message.
   • Focused Inbox — only messages Outlook sorts into Focused. This is the setting most people want, and it requires Focused Inbox to be on.
   • None — no mail alerts at all. Calendar reminders still come through.
3. Scroll to the Accounts section further down the same screen. Each account has its own toggle. Turn off the account you do not want interrupting you — turning off a personal account here is the fastest way to stop weekend shopping receipts buzzing your phone while work mail still arrives.
4. Below that, set Calendar notifications separately. Meeting reminders and mail alerts are independent, and silencing mail does not silence your next meeting.
5. Tap the back arrow to save. Outlook applies the change immediately — there is no Save button.

Note: Outlook's settings sit on top of your phone's own notification rules, and the phone wins. If nothing arrives after setting this up, check the phone: on iOS, Settings > Notifications > Outlook and confirm Allow Notifications is on; on Android, Settings > Apps > Outlook > Notifications, and also check Battery > Unrestricted so Android is not putting the app to sleep in the background.

6. Set a Do Not Disturb Schedule for Work Hours

Silencing notifications by hand every evening lasts about four days. Outlook has a repeating schedule built in.

1. Tap your profile picture in the top-left corner of the inbox.
2. Tap the bell icon at the top of the panel. The Do Not Disturb screen opens.
3. The top of the screen holds one-off timers — For 1 hour, Until tomorrow, Until next week, and Until I turn it back on. Tap one for a single quiet evening.
4. For something repeating, use the section below, headed Set schedule or Time off depending on your app version. It offers up to three rules:
   • Daily — a quiet window every day. Set it to run from the end of your working day to the start of the next one.
   • Weekends — silences Saturday and Sunday entirely.
   • Events — silences notifications while a meeting is on your calendar, which is the one that stops your phone lighting up mid-presentation.
5. Turn on the rules you want and tap each to set its times. Tap the back arrow when you are done.

Verification: A bar reading Notifications are paused appears across the top of the inbox while a rule is active, with a link to end it early. If you set a one-off timer and want it gone sooner, tap that bar.

Tip: Set Daily to end 30 minutes after you normally start work rather than at your start time. Nothing arrives in your first half-hour that improves for being read on the commute, and the difference in how the day begins is noticeable.

7. Fix the Signature and the Extras Worth a Minute

A short pass through the rest of the settings screen. None of these take longer than the sentence describing them.

1. Signature. On the Settings screen, tap Signature under Mail. New installs carry Get Outlook for iOS or Get Outlook for Android, which is advertising you are sending to clients. Replace the text with your name, role and phone number. If you have more than one account in the app, turn on Per Account Signature first so work and personal each get their own.
2. Organize mail by thread. A toggle on the Settings screen that groups replies into a single conversation. On is right for most inboxes; turn it off if you work in a busy mailbox where collapsing a thread hides messages you need to see individually.
3. Default Sender Account. Sets which address a new message comes from when you tap Compose. Worth setting explicitly on a phone holding both work and personal mail — replying to a client from a personal address is a hard mistake to walk back.
4. Play My Emails. An older feature that read new messages aloud through your headphones during a commute. Microsoft has wound it down, so it is absent from recent builds. If your version still lists it under the account, it works as before; if it is gone, your phone's own screen reader covers the same ground.
5. Calendar settings. Under the Calendar heading, Default calendar decides which calendar a new event lands in, and Week start aligns the app with the rest of your week. Both take one tap and stop small irritations later.

Troubleshooting

TIP

Assign Archive to one swipe direction and Snooze to the other, and keep Delete off both. Every message then either leaves the inbox recoverably or comes back when you can deal with it, and an accidental swipe on a crowded train costs you nothing.

Symptom / Error	Potential Cause	Solution
Swipe options is missing from the Settings screen	Outdated app version	Update Outlook from the App Store or Google Play Store, close the app fully, and reopen it. The row sits under the Mail heading in every current build.
Swiping shows a row of buttons instead of running the action	The gesture stopped short	Drag the message the full width of the screen and release. A short drag reveals the action panel and holds it there so you can back out.
The swipe deletes when you meant to archive	Left and right assignments reversed	The labels name the direction your finger travels, not the side the message exits. Swap the two values in Step 2 and test on a newsletter before trusting it.
Archived messages cannot be found	Looking in Deleted Items	Tap your profile picture, tap the account name to expand its folders, and tap Archive. The folder syncs with Outlook on your computer, so the same messages are there too.
No notifications from the work account	Account toggled off, or the phone is throttling the app	Check the account's own toggle under Notifications > Accounts (Step 5), then check the phone: Settings > Notifications > Outlook on iOS, or Settings > Apps > Outlook > Notifications and Battery on Android.
Do Not Disturb never switches itself back off	Set to Until I turn it back on	Tap the Notifications are paused bar at the top of the inbox to end it, then set a Daily rule with a fixed end time instead (Step 6).
Mail stopped arriving after changing settings	Account sync problem, not a settings problem	Notification settings do not stop mail syncing. Work through How to Fix Outlook Not Syncing on Your Phone.

Related Articles

• How to Set Up the Outlook Mobile App
• How to Use Focused Inbox in Outlook
• How to Archive Old Emails in Outlook
• How to Fix Outlook Not Syncing on Your Phone
• How to Secure Your Personal Phone for Work
• How to Set Up Your Work Profile on a Personal Device (BYOD)

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