Classic Outlook Focused Inbox Disappeared

Thank you for sharing your findings, Deanna. The only thing I would change in your steps is to use the Profile picker to create a new classic Outlook profile, Create an Outlook profile - Microsoft Support. The reason I say this is that the Control Panel Mail applet was not updated to support Modern Auth so it might not always work to create a new profile.

FYI - We had an employee with the same issue, where [Focused/Other] Inbox setting would show on Outlook Classic desktop app upon login (Microsoft 365 account). But after browsing around in subfolders and then back to the Inbox, the setting would revert to [All/Unread] and [Show Focused Inbox] toggle would disappear from the [View] menu.
We tried a few things, including updating the Online Portal Inbox settings to see if that was driving the desktop app. However, I found a Microsoft article explaining what can cause the issue:

"CAUSE: This issue occurs because the Autodiscover process that's used by Outlook did not retrieve the XML from Microsoft 365, and received an unexpected result from a third-party web server that uses IMAP settings from either https:// or https://autodiscover..

Typically in this situation, the lookup fails and Outlook eventually performs an Autodiscover lookup against https://outlook.office365/AutoDiscover/AutoDiscover.xml. However, because Outlook receives a successful Autodiscover response that has IMAP settings, it marks the account as a non-Microsoft 365 account, and then stores the Autodiscover URL as the Last Known Good URL in the profile."

Rather than going through registry settings that the above article suggested, I created a new Mail profile and it appears to be successful!

• Open [Control Panel]
• Select [Mail (Microsoft Outlook)]
  • [Show Profiles...]
  • [Add...] and enter new Profile Name, the click [OK]
  • [Always use this profile] - select new Profile from dropdown list
  • Click [OK]
• Launch Outlook and wait for new profile to load; this can take some time to load depending on how large of an Outlook account to load and has lots of subfolders, emails, calendar entries, etc.
  • Note: View status bar at bottom of Outlook window for status of folders loading to desktop app
  • Test the [Focused Inbox] settings by clicking between subfolders and back to Inbox to verify the Focused option is still available

You can go ahead and update back to the latest build. I don't think the build will matter in this case.

Here are some references for checking Autodiscover, External Domain Name System records for Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn. This MVP article is a good reference, Autodiscover: Some quick methods to get it working - Robert 365.

To test for this, do the following:

1. Browse to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer
2. Click Outlook Connectivity test
3. Enter the email address and sign in with the account that is missing Focused Inbox
4. Run the test with the default options

After the test finishes click Expand All and then search the results for IMAP. If IMAP is not found do any of the tests have failures?

After doing the rollback, which didn't really work, I tried the above "workaround" registry edit fix. This seems to have fixed the problem. Very odd since this basically does a fix if the Exchange host is misconfigured - and I am using Microsoft as the host - but it is working.

I followed the directions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/profiles-and-accounts/focused-inbox-disappears-switch-folder But, basically, these are the solution steps:

1. Open regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover
3. Add a new DWORD key, Value = ExcludeLastKnownGoodURL, Value Data = 1
4. Reboot

Hope that works for everyone dealing with this.

I am still on Build 2412 after the rollback - not sure if it is the reg fix or the combo of reg fix and rollback. But I am now back to fully operating. If anything changes, I'll update the post.

Actually, the images you see - both working and not working - are from the same account hosted by Microsoft. It is not the enterprise address that has the problem. Please review again.

Another bit of info: Focused Inbox is working flawlessly on the mobile version. This is only happening on the desktop version.

Thanks in advance.