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How to Turn Off Mail Categories in iOS 18.2
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I have used Categories for 20 minutes and I already hate the feature. I wish turning it off just set my email back to how it used to be! My email is now full of meaningless coloured logos that I DON'T want! Come on Apple, you can do better than this.
Apple today is releasing iOS 18.2, which introduces a major change to the Mail app with its new Categories feature. Categories automatically sorts your emails into four distinct sections: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. However, while this organizational system aims to help manage email overload, not everyone is going to prefer the new layout.
Mail Categories attempts to intelligently organize your incoming emails into different sections. Important emails are shown in a "Primary" category, with orders, newsletters, social notifications, and deals organized into three other sections.
The "Transactions" section includes receipts, orders, and deliveries, and aims to make it easy to find orders that you've placed and shipping information for those orders. Meanwhile, the "Updates" section includes newsletters, alerts for things like doctor's appointments and correspondence, and other subscription emails. Lastly, Apple's "Promotions" category includes special offers and deal emails.
Note that even if an email would normally fall into Transactions, Updates, or Promotions, it will also appear in your Primary inbox if it contains time-critical information. On devices that support Apple Intelligence, the system goes a step further by highlighting priority emails that require action or have deadlines.
Mail Categories: Why You Might Want to Revert
The new Categories view, while helpful for some, might not suit your email management style for several reasons:
You can swipe left across the categories to switch to an All Mail view, but what if you want to remove the categories completely?
- You prefer seeing all emails in chronological order.
- Some messages may be incorrectly categorized.
- You have your own organization system.
- You find the extra sections distracting.
- You want faster access to all emails without switching between categories.
iOS 18.2: How to Return to List View in Apple Mail
Categories is the default view after updating to the new software. Fortunately, Apple makes it simple to switch back to the traditional list view. Here's how it's done:
- Open the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Tap the More button (three dots) in the upper right corner of your inbox.
- Select List View from the pop-up menu.
Once you switch to List View, your inbox will return to showing all emails in chronological order, just as it did before iOS 18.2. The change takes effect immediately. While categorization is not perfect, it's likely something that Apple will improve over time. You can always switch back to Categories view using the same menu if you want to try it again later.
Note: If you're using an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, you'll see an additional option in the More menu for priority messages. This option won't appear on devices without Apple Intelligence support. The More menu also has an "About Categories" section where you can see how your messages have been categorized over the course of the last week, but there is no option to tell the Mail app if you believe an email has been put into the wrong category.
Article Link: How to Turn Off Mail Categories in iOS 18.2
Mark.
Heystu was emphasizing that the feature is so bad, he'd even have paid for a subscription, if he had to, to remove it!
Now, I have a hard time wrapping my brain around all the people who are critical of folders or who rely on one big In box and sort all their email manually! I understand it as a way of forcing you to read each one, but that’d be too tedious and laborious for me.
On Thunderbird on the Mac, e.g., you can set filtering rules that sort the new and sent mail automatically into different categories. Spiffy and efficient!
Works like a charm — I’ve set up folders for “Family & Friends”; “Shopping”; “Banks”, “Astronomy”, “Mac”, etc.
You can even set up SPAM rules to sort known intrusive email addresses into the “Junk” folder.
I’ve tweaked mine so that it bolds the name of any folder that has new emails and always shows the total number of still unread messages, including new ones, beside each folder's name. Makes it easy and fast to focus on important emails and save the others for later.
In contrast, this new feature for Mail appears to be a real kludge.
Am I right that Mail on i-devices still doesn't give users the ability to set up custom rules and auto-sort incoming mail? I still use Mail on my iPad, but wish I could set up rules.
Also, IIRC, the one stretch I tried Mail on the Mac, the auto-filtering didn't seem to work all that well. So, I switched back to Thunderbird.
You can get rid of them. IT Troll replied on another thread:
Yes, it is in Settings > Apps > Mail > Show Contact Photo. You can also fix the badge count in Notification settings.
I'm not surprised people don't find this option. "Show Contact Photo" is horribly unintuitive for the category icons.
Switching to list view doesn't change the setting for the notification badge, which is found in the separate Notifications settings. The Mail app warns you about this but doesn't actually make the change.
Apple used to be good at this UI stuff.
Switching to list view doesn't change the setting for the notification badge, which is found in the separate Notifications settings. The Mail app warns you about this but doesn't actually make the change.
Apple used to be good at this UI stuff.
I'm offended and angry that Apple throws us curve balls like junking up the Mail app when we didn't consent to any major changes. (When I'm ready to tackle major operating changes, I'll upgrade to the next annual version, and not before I'm ready.) A minor version upgrade shouldn't result in messing up your ability to use your phone as a productivity tool. I don't want to fight with my phone or Apple.
I want Apple to think about what the customer wants, which is on-time delivery of software that works, and not springing surprises on us in minor upgrades that cause us to want to throw our phones. At the very least, Apple could provide additional "features" turned off in incremental upgrades, with the ability to add as desired. This is especially true for "features" that prevent us from interacting with our phone as we did a day before.
Apple, treat us with respect. Burying our email in non-helpful, garish graphics and segregating categories we didn't want is not respectful.
Thanks to the author and the comments here that provide us the means to get back what we had and wanted.
I want Apple to think about what the customer wants, which is on-time delivery of software that works, and not springing surprises on us in minor upgrades that cause us to want to throw our phones. At the very least, Apple could provide additional "features" turned off in incremental upgrades, with the ability to add as desired. This is especially true for "features" that prevent us from interacting with our phone as we did a day before.
Apple, treat us with respect. Burying our email in non-helpful, garish graphics and segregating categories we didn't want is not respectful.
Thanks to the author and the comments here that provide us the means to get back what we had and wanted.
For third party email services like Gmail and iCloud, you can set server side rules to sort into your different IMAP mailboxes, and that feature has been around for a while, though it's not as robust as the macOS Mail.app rules as far as fine-grained stuff goes. For iCloud, you set it up on the iCloud website, and same for Gmail, but they use tags to emulate mailboxes, IIRC, even thought they send it to clients as a particular IMAP folder.
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I find this category thing in the Inbox incredibly annoying, the number of mails in my Inbox doesn't require it, as everything is getting sorted into the correct folders on the iCloud and Gmail servers, plus macOS Mail.app still has rules.
I wonder if Apple is using categories as an excuse to collect marketing information for themselves, as they do use marketing information gleaned from data collection from customers, though they don't sell it.
If I switch to list view, does it just no display the categories or does it stop the categorization process altogether?
I don’t know about Mac and iPad, but on my iPhone I can slide right on a message and tap ‘remind me’ to set the snooze function. There are some default options there or a custom setting at the bottom.