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Guides for school parents

Stop school emails taking over your Outlook or Hotmail

Every parent knows the feeling: three school emails before drop-off, a newsletter at noon, a fee reminder at four, and a phone that buzzes for every single one. None of them can be ignored, and none of them needed to interrupt your afternoon either.

Plenty of UAE families run their life from a Hotmail or Outlook address, and most guides online are written for Gmail. Here is the ten-minute fix for Outlook, Hotmail, Live and MSN, which all run on the same system now. Two steps, because the step every other guide stops at only does half the job.

Step 1: send school mail to the Other tab

Outlook splits your inbox into two tabs, Focused and Other. The trick is to keep school mail in the inbox but tuck it into Other, so it stops crowding the messages you actually need to see first. In the Outlook app on your phone:

  1. Open a school email.
  2. Tap the three dots at the top, or press and hold the email in the list.
  3. Choose Move to Other, then Always move to Other.

From now on, mail from that sender lands quietly in Other. Do the same for the school platforms that email you: ClassDojo, Seesaw, Toddle and friends. Nothing is deleted, nothing is lost. It is all in your inbox when you look for it.

One move to avoid: do not send school mail to its own folder. A folder tucks mail away, but it also hides it from anything that reads your inbox, and it is easy to forget a folder exists. The Other tab keeps school mail in the inbox while keeping it out of your face, which is the safer route.

Step 2: the setting every guide misses

Here is the catch: the Focused and Other split controls where mail lands. A different setting controls what pings. If your Outlook app notifies you for all mail, school emails in the Other tab still buzz your phone, and you will wonder why the tidy-up "didn't work". It did. This is the other half:

  1. In the Outlook app, open Settings, usually the gear icon or your profile picture.
  2. Tap Notifications.
  3. Choose Focused inbox only, so only the Focused tab can ping you.

That is the moment the pings actually stop. Focused keeps buzzing for the people you hear from often. Other, where the school mail now sits, stays silent.

On the computer, at Outlook.com or Hotmail.com

The same idea works in a browser. Right-click a school email, choose Move to, then Always move to Other. If you would rather Outlook did it for you, open Settings, then Mail, then Rules, and make a rule that moves mail from the school's address to Other. Keep it as Other, not a new folder, for the same reason as above.

One sender still getting through?

Schools rarely send from one address. There is the office, the platform, a noreply subdomain, sometimes each teacher. Open the email that pinged you, note the exact address it came from, and set that one to Always move to Other as well. Usually it takes two or three rounds and then silence.

Muting works best when something is still reading them

A quiet inbox is lovely. A quiet inbox where the trip fee still gets paid and the PE kit still gets packed is the actual goal. That is what Hey Raha is for: she reads the school emails you just quieted, pulls out the dates, fees and to-dos, and turns them into one calm daily plan for your family. Focused, Other, it makes no difference, she reads your inbox all the same.

Made in the UAE, so she knows FS2 from Year 1 and a term-fee deadline in AED.

Try Hey Raha free

Using Hey Raha already? Keep school mail in the inbox, where the Other tab still counts, and connect Outlook in one tap. She reads what lands in the inbox, so the Focused and Other split quiets your phone without hiding anything from her. Sending mail to a separate folder is the one thing to skip. The Quiet the school pings card in your setup guide has these same steps in-app.

On Gmail instead? Here is the Gmail version, with the notification step most guides miss. More from this series: Too many school emails? The three-list system that actually works and FS1, FS2, KG1, Year 1: UAE year groups explained. All guides: the hub.

One calm message a week on WhatsApp: follow Raha's channel for what's coming in the school year.