Microsoft have begun the rollout of a major update for Microsoft Office 365 which will among other things result in some fundamental changes to how we organise our emails going forward.

For decades the Inbox has been at the centre of all of our electronic communications, however this has for many become the source of information overload, demanding more and more time to filter out the ‘noise’ and get to the information that we really do need to read.

Microsoft have been grappling with this issue for a while, and previously released the ‘clutter’ feature which filtered out certain emails automatically, but it still required us to remember to go off hunting for another folder and then go sifting through these emails too.

The latest update is being described as a refinement of the clutter feature, but in some ways turns it on its head by including a new ‘Focussed Inbox’ where it’s intended the information that really matters to us will land, with everything else flowing to your ‘Other’ Inbox which is available via an ever present tab, rather than making you go hunting through your folders.

Beyond a new way to organise email, the latest updates to Microsoft Office 365 also include a familiar feature for Twitter users with the addition of @mentions when writing emails. By mentioning one of your contacts via an @mention for example @joe bloggs (then confirming the contact within a popup list), this will add them to the list of recipients for that particular email.

The @mentions feature is already live in Outlook on the web and is available for Office Insiders using Outlook 2016 for Windows and Mac and will be coming soon to Outlook for iOS, Android and Windows 10 Mobile.