Discover how Apple's new Mail categories feature can simplify your email management by automatically sorting your messages into organised categories, making it easier to find what you need.
Image: Mariia Shalabaieva/Unsplash
Keeping our inboxes organized often feels like an overwhelming task.
If you’re fortunate, yours contains only messages from people you wish to communicate with. Realistically, though, most are cluttered with newsletters, receipts, social media digests, and more. These emails aren’t necessarily spam, but they complicate the process of quickly sifting through to find the messages we want to see.
This week, Apple introduced a feature to the Mac that aims to help cut through inbox clutter by automatically organizing messages into smart categories. The feature is new in the Mail app in macOS 15.4 and comes several months after Apple debuted the feature on the iPhone in iOS 18.2. Here’s how to use it.
As of this week, the new Mail categories features are available on all Macs, iPhones, and iPads that are capable of running the latest operating systems. That’s macOS 15.4, iOS 18.2, and iPadOS 18.2 and later.
The central concept behind Mail categories is that it uses on-device processing—meaning Apple is not reading anything—to sort your emails into five categories:
By clicking or tapping on any of the category banners, you will quickly see all the emails that fit into that category displayed in your inbox. This can help decrease the time it takes you to find the email you’re looking for and eliminate the need to sort your emails yourself.
As excited as many people are about Apple’s new Mail categories feature, it’s worth noting that Apple isn’t exactly innovating here. Google’s Gmail has offered automatic email categorization for years.
The best thing about Apple’s new Mail category feature on Mac, iPhone, and iPad is that it’s pretty much automatic. Once you have the email app set up to display categories, Apple’s email client will do everything.
The new categories feature is part of the Mac’s built-in email client, Mail.
Image: File
To make sure your Mail app is set up to display categories, do the following:
You will now see a new button bar above your inbox with five buttons, each featuring a unique icon: a person (Primary), a shopping cart (Transactions), a word balloon (Updates), a megaphone (Promotions), and a drawer (All Mail).
Select any of the buttons to quickly see the emails that are sorted into the respective categories.
Apple also knows that some people may prefer to have emails from certain senders appear in a category other than the one Mail has assigned. That’s why the company also allows users to manually change the category designation for emails from the same sender.
The feature is also available on the iPhone and iPad.
Image: File
For example, if you would prefer that the emails you receive from your local movie theater be sorted into the Promotions category instead of the Updates category, you can automatically reassign it. Here’s how:
One nice thing about the new Mail category feature is that it is not part of Apple Intelligence, which means it is not limited to Macs, iPhones, and iPads that can run Apple Intelligence.
As long as your Mac can run macOS Sequoia and your iPhone and iPad can run iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, respectively, you can take advantage of the new Mail categorization features right now.
Of course, it’s worth noting that not everyone may like the new Mail categorization feature. And if you’re one of them, there’s an easy way to turn it off. Simply go to your inbox and select the three dots button (…). On Mac, click “Show Mail Categories” so the checkmark next to it disappears. On iPhone and iPad, tap “List View” and the Categories feature will be hidden.
