Outlook Email Integration
Outlook Email Integration
Focus Engine connects to Outlook mailboxes via the Microsoft Graph API to bring email triage into your Daily Briefing. Unread counts, category-flagged messages, and urgency-detected alerts are all surfaced alongside your calendar and tasks — so you get a complete picture of the day without opening Outlook.
Prerequisites
- A Microsoft 365 (M365) account
- Outlook Calendar or Outlook Email integration enabled (both share the same OAuth token)
Note: If you have already connected Outlook Calendar, you do not need to authenticate again. The same Microsoft OAuth token covers both calendar and email access.
What Gets Pulled In
| Data | Description |
|---|---|
| Unread counts | Total unread messages per mailbox, surfaced in the Daily Briefing email triage section |
| Category-flagged emails | Messages organised into Outlook categories are read and displayed with their category label |
| Urgency-detected items | Emails flagged by pattern matching as time-sensitive, elevated above the standard unread summary |
Urgency Detection
Focus Engine scans fetched message metadata for high-signal patterns to separate genuinely urgent emails from background noise.
Detection Signals
- Keywords — Subject lines and sender names are matched against terms such as
failed,alert,expired,overdue,ASAP, and similar urgency markers. - Sender reputation — Known high-priority senders (e.g. cloud provider alerts from AWS or Azure, security teams, finance systems) are weighted higher.
- Notification type — System-generated alerts, error reports, and security notices are classified separately from newsletters or low-priority notifications.
Urgent items surface at the top of the email triage section of your Daily Briefing, with a visual indicator distinguishing them from standard unread messages.
Privacy note: Urgency detection runs against fetched message metadata (sender, subject, notification type). Full email body content is not stored by Focus Engine.
Connecting Outlook Email
- Go to Settings → Integrations.
- Under the Microsoft section, select Outlook Email.
- If you have not yet connected a Microsoft account, you will be prompted to authorise via Microsoft OAuth. Grant the required Microsoft Graph API permissions.
- If Outlook Calendar is already connected, the integration will activate immediately — no additional sign-in required.
- Select the mailboxes you want to include in your Daily Briefing.
Graceful Degradation
Outlook Email is an optional integration. If it is not connected, or if a fetch fails:
- Your Daily Briefing continues to display calendar, tasks, and any other connected integrations.
- The email triage section is hidden rather than showing an error state.
- Reconnecting the integration restores full email triage on the next briefing refresh.
Related
- Outlook Calendar Integration — Calendar and email share the same Microsoft OAuth token.
- Daily Briefing — Where email triage appears alongside your schedule and task priorities.
- Urgency Detection — How Focus Engine classifies and surfaces time-sensitive signals across integrations.