With the new automatic mail categorization in Apple Mail, you can organize your emails and keep your personal inbox less cluttered. It’ll intelligently put all your newsletters, receipts and promotions into separate folders.
If you struggle keeping up with your inbox, this feature is a great way to make your email easier to understand at a glance.
Keep reading below or watch our quick video.
Organize emails with Apple’s automatic mail categories
Email is more than 50 years old, but it’s still central to almost everyone’s work and personal lives. If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, the only way to achieve inbox zero is by declaring bankruptcy: Select everything and archive it. (Or simply mark them as read, if that’s your style.)
But if you want to maintain an organized inbox going forward, you need a new strategy. And Apple’s automatic mail categorization is a good, built-in way to get yourself organized.
This feature is available in iOS 18.2 or later.
Table of contents: Organize emails with Apple’s automatic mail categories
- Organize emails into four different categories
- See all the messages from the same sender
- Move and organize emails into different categories
- Turn off mail categories
- More features in Apple Mail
Organize emails into four different categories
Screenshot: Apple
At the top of your inbox, you’ll see a set of buttons that you can use to switch between categories. Tap on a category to filter emails; tap on it again to go back to All Mail.
Apple describes the four different categories in its support document as such:
- Primary: “Find personal messages and time-sensitive information.”
- Transactions: “Keep track of your confirmations, receipts, and shipping notices.”
- Updates: “Catch up on news, newsletters, and social updates.”
- Promotions: “Browse your coupon and sales emails.”
The icon will have a dot on it if there’s a new email in that category.
Swipe left or right on the category list to toggle between All Mail and the most recently used category.
See all messages from a single sender
While in the Transactions, Updates or Promotions category, tapping on an email in the list brings up a special view that emphasizes the sender’s name. This view can show you all the emails you’ve received from that sender (like everything from Amazon.com, your bank or your health care provider).
To see them all, look just below the name of the sender. You’ll see a summary of the emails they’ve sent. For instance, in the Transactions category, you will see them listed as Transactions, Messages and New.
Tap Messages at the top of the screen, then tap Show All Messages to see every email from that sender in one continuous view. This way, you can scroll through all the information from your hotel reservation, or get all the information on your orders in one place.
Move and organize emails into different categories
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
If you find that Apple Mail sorted one of your contacts into the wrong category, you can fix that yourself, in a few different ways:
- While you’re in your inbox, swipe left on an email, tap the More button (⋯) then tap Categorize Sender.
- While you’re reading an email, tap the Reply button in the bottom toolbar, then tap Categorize Sender.
You can manually sort the sender into any of the four categories, or set them back to sort Automatically on a per-message basis. Pick an option from the panel, then tap Continue to confirm.
Turn off mail categories
If you don’t like Apple’s mail categorization, you can easily disable it. From the Inbox, tap the More button (⋯) in the upper right and tap List View.
On a Mac, you can find this option in the menu bar. Go to View > Show Mail Categories to enable or disable the feature.
