The mail app changed? Looks like the same crappy app we have had forever. Apple should just admit they can't do these types of apps and let the Microsofts/Googles of the world have at it.
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Apple's Redesigned Mail App is Expanding to the Mac — Here's When
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It does help. Because a) I can choose to not receive notifications that are sorted as promotional, that already makes a big difference. And b) It makes it easier to see what are actual emails without having to scroll through the 5-10 emails I receive per hour.
Apple should get back into the social media game. I’ll never forget Ping!
How useful is it to hide a feature like that in an unintuitive way. Why couldn’t it just be an All category that is always visible like the others?
Setting aside the dreadful lack of consistent updates across their offerings that span years in most cases, meaningful updates for mail, across every platform should happen outside the bounds of an OS update. This is insanity. And it should be that way for Safari, notes and every first party app. Apple needs to steal a page from Google on this.
But I had a thought, maybe this seemingly arbitrary limitation isn't arbitrary at all and instead is a foolish way to juice upgrade numbers.
But I had a thought, maybe this seemingly arbitrary limitation isn't arbitrary at all and instead is a foolish way to juice upgrade numbers.
Yes, but… you can only manually categorize mail by the sender email address to the four predefined categories Apple chose for us: Primary, Transactions, Updates, Promotions.
The machine learning auto-categorization is hit or miss, which makes it next to useless since instead of originally reviewing one integrated inbox, you now have to review four integrated inboxes to make sure you don’t miss an important email that ended up in Promotions.
I wondered the same thing. I find the plain old junk filtering we’ve had for years works pretty well. It does require you to mark any messages that slip by as junk to keep it trained, but if you do this, it’s pretty solid.
As a 30+ year Apple customer I’m sad to say the words “Apple” and “intuitive” are not present in the same sentence anywhere near as often as they used to be.
This used to be the way.
Not anymore, like you said. Nearly everything waits for the magic moment of an OS update, which I agree is a very stupid way of updating and distributing their apps in nearly all cases unless there's actually some true OS required feature that must be there for the app to operate, which is not the case the majority of the time.
Maybe they should just put all of their apps into their own App Store, OS apps included like Mail, Messages and all the others. Then, just update through there. It IS called the App Store for a reason, isn't it? For apps!
And for those rare cases when an app requires an OS level feature to be available, then sure, wait for the OS update to come out and then either:
a) Release it with the OS update like they do now
b) Make the App Store smarter and look at the user's system. If it doesn't have the required OS version (well, this already happens with some apps, so I don't even think they'd need to change much) then it will only update it to a certain version until or unless the user upgrades their OS version.
That seems like a logical, and very simple distribution model to me. I don't see any reason why it couldn't and shouldn't be done as well.
Yep, another ‘AI’ feature to turn-off thank you.
In any case, it’s only really useful if you have lots of lots of emails coming in every day. For everyone else it’s pointless.
In any case, it’s only really useful if you have lots of lots of emails coming in every day. For everyone else it’s pointless.
Glad I can use a different email program that is customizable and retrieves my mail from the *.Mac servers and others just fine.
I turned it off on my iPhone after the first mis-categorization. I'm all for AI enhanced features, but I wish Apple spent a bit more time on the Messages app to get rid of all the increasingly frequent spam there! I use gmail and see very little junk mail in my Mail app as it's already been filtered out on the server. But Messages is another story - Apple has been too lazy there for years. With increasing use of message-based TFA, I can't afford to do the only filtering Apple does provide - from Contacts only. And, I don't know about you, I have no clue what "Delete and Report Junk" actually does. Sure, it deletes a junk message, but who does it report to? I wish that action at least let me block that number - but, NOOOOO - I have to go through the manual process of doing so :-(
I do appreciate your point and think it's valid.
But I also know that Apple's OS have long concealed some functionality to preserve a degree of simplicity, and reward exploration with discovery of hidden features.
It's probably an approach thing – if you know that Apple often provide more than meets the eye, you can make experimenting – trying out clicks/taps & standard gestures to see what's possible – a part of getting to grips with new software / new versions.
Can someone train an AI to automatically detect and disable new "AI" features in software updates? And to make sure that if you turn them off they stay turned off? Maybe set a flag in my Apple ID to say "this user wants AI features disabled by default"?
If it's not near-100% reliable, it's not just pointless, it creates an active nuisance & risk of missing a message if its been sorted to the wrong category. If you can't depend on it (and I've yet to see an LLM/Machine Learning system that doesn't make nonsensical mistakes) then the upshot is you now have to check multiple categories to be sure.
Maybe use this to set an "intelligent" top choice for the "Move to..." menu, but please leave the actual decision to the human who actually understands what words mean in context, not a LLM which only knows what words are statistically likely to be next to other words.
It's bad enough that the current volumes of spam more or less mandate the use of a spam filter - those are pretty effective but still I need to remember to check my "Junk" folder every few days in case something important has been mis-tagged. Want to do clever things in AI? - train it to detect "false positives" in the Junk folder and send a notification.
Well, I think at the end of the day we are talking about tools here. These features are aimed at saving time, so spending time “exploring and discovering” in order to even know they are there and take advantage of them seems antithetical. I understand spending a hit of time acquainting yourself with a new feature because you know it is there, but channeling your inner hobbit and “going on an adventure” to see if there is something there is a non-starter for me, and probably a lot of others.
Since they updated it on the iPhone (and I turned off the categories), the app has been very slow to use. Also, if I turned off the categories, why are there still icons there?!
Will be turning off the categorisation on Day 1, like I did on the iPhone too........