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Why is apple dedicating software engineering resources to ruining the Mail app and destroying the Photos app instead of fixing Siri and autocorrect, which have been broken from inception? Make it make sense......
I would argue they should be spending resources improving their spam filters on their email server.
 


With iOS 18.2, Apple added a Categories view in the Mail app, which is designed to organize your incoming emails by type. Categories hasn't been receiving the best response from iPhone users, so we thought we'd check it out.


Mail Categories organizes your email inbox into the following sections: Primary for your most important messages, Transactions for your orders and receipts, Promotions for deals and offers, and Updates for news, subscriptions, and social.

When Mail Categories is enabled, your Primary inbox will be front and center, and then you can swipe over to see other emails that fall into the other categories. The idea is that emails that aren't important like newsletters and deals are tucked away, but there's also an added benefit of having all of your order receipts in one spot, or your emails about sales in one section of your inbox.

There's also a useful feature that aggregates all of the emails from a single sender into one view, so you can see all of your Amazon emails in one place, or everything you've received from an airline. To get to this view, you just need to tap into any email from that sender and then scroll up to see other messages.

The Primary inbox contains emails from other categories, and it's a feature that can make sense for someone with an overwhelming inbox, but it's not likely something that inbox zero people are going to like.

If you don't like Mail Categories, you can swap back over to List View by tapping on the three dots in the upper right corner of the Mail app, but if you do want to give Mail Categories a try, there are a couple tips worth noting.

To get to a view of your inbox with all emails in chronological order without swapping views, just swipe left on the category bar to get to the "All Mail" option.

It's not uncommon for an email to be sent to the wrong category, and if that happens, you can tap into the email, tap on the three dots in the upper right hand corner of the display, and then choose the Categorize Sender option to choose a category manually. If you're in the Primary inbox, though, you need to hit reply and then choose the Categorize Sender option.

When you tap into a message from a sender, you can delete all emails from that sender by using the three dots at the top right of the display and choosing the "Trash All" option.

What do you think of categories in Mail? Is it a feature you plan to use? Let us know in the comments below.

Article Link: iOS 18.2: Here's How Mail Categories Work
Probably one of the worst upgrades apple has made to Mail. Turned it all off. This was a solution to no problem. Still don’t see why the need.
 
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Probably one of the worst upgrades apple has made to Mail. Turned it all off. This was a solution to no problem. Still don’t see why the need.
Getting hundreds of emails a day is absolutely a problem for some. There are many that I don’t necessarily want to completely unsubscribe from or classify sender as junk so they remain, but they make it harder to see the important ones or find or even remember a semi-important message from earlier in the week.

If it could distinguish between and separate notifications vs advertisements and newsletters vs donation solicitations that would be much better though.
 
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Good luck with this. Mail still sends my wife’s emails, along with countless other of my contacts me sages to the junk folder. If they can’t get that right what chance this?
 
Its infuriating. Turned it off immediately.

Such a shame that these companies are now dictated by product managers and not engineers. Everything has to be algorithmic and a "feed" now- because a straight simple list does not give them any data metrics
it doesn’t work at all on my account. I have emails in multiple languages and the new Mail categorisation seems to be unable to handle that. Typical Apple.
 
  • Sad
Reactions: arc of the universe
Really wanted to like this. Tried it for two days, and after those two days I also wanted to throw the device in front of a train. So many incorrectly categorized emails that recategorizing simply became a part-time job.

And why can't Apple get the favicons right. It should be a simple task that Apple Intelligence pulls from the domain URL - www.domain.com/favicon.ico!

Instead, I have emails from vendors with orange in their logo showing as HomeDepot - they are not HomeDepot. I have vendors with an arrow that show as Amazon - they are not amazon. There are emails with no logo where I can easily pull the favicon based off the domain info in the senders email.
 
Would it be same to assume that those of us who don’t have Apple Intelligence compatible devices shouldn’t even care about iOS updates anymore? Just update our devices for security reasons?
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: Firestorm007
I see all this hate for it. I want to try it. And I can’t. I have a 12 mini phone. Rather ridiculously, Apple didn’t roll this out to iPads and MacBooks.

My goal is an inbox with no messages. But I don’t always stay on top of that and have to do cleanup sessions. This feature will help with that.
 


With iOS 18.2, Apple added a Categories view in the Mail app, which is designed to organize your incoming emails by type. Categories hasn't been receiving the best response from iPhone users, so we thought we'd check it out.


Mail Categories organizes your email inbox into the following sections: Primary for your most important messages, Transactions for your orders and receipts, Promotions for deals and offers, and Updates for news, subscriptions, and social.

When Mail Categories is enabled, your Primary inbox will be front and center, and then you can swipe over to see other emails that fall into the other categories. The idea is that emails that aren't important like newsletters and deals are tucked away, but there's also an added benefit of having all of your order receipts in one spot, or your emails about sales in one section of your inbox.

There's also a useful feature that aggregates all of the emails from a single sender into one view, so you can see all of your Amazon emails in one place, or everything you've received from an airline. To get to this view, you just need to tap into any email from that sender and then scroll up to see other messages.

The Primary inbox contains emails from other categories, and it's a feature that can make sense for someone with an overwhelming inbox, but it's not likely something that inbox zero people are going to like.

If you don't like Mail Categories, you can swap back over to List View by tapping on the three dots in the upper right corner of the Mail app, but if you do want to give Mail Categories a try, there are a couple tips worth noting.

To get to a view of your inbox with all emails in chronological order without swapping views, just swipe left on the category bar to get to the "All Mail" option.

It's not uncommon for an email to be sent to the wrong category, and if that happens, you can tap into the email, tap on the three dots in the upper right hand corner of the display, and then choose the Categorize Sender option to choose a category manually. If you're in the Primary inbox, though, you need to hit reply and then choose the Categorize Sender option.

When you tap into a message from a sender, you can delete all emails from that sender by using the three dots at the top right of the display and choosing the "Trash All" option.

What do you think of categories in Mail? Is it a feature you plan to use? Let us know in the comments below.

Article Link: iOS 18.2: Here's How Mail Categories Work
Love it on my iPhone 13 but not available on my new Mac Mini or my M4 iPad?!! W-T-F!
 
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I see all this hate for it. I want to try it. And I can’t. I have a 12 mini phone. Rather ridiculously, Apple didn’t roll this out to iPads and MacBooks.

My goal is an inbox with no messages. But I don’t always stay on top of that and have to do cleanup sessions. This feature will help with that.
It works on my 13 mini so it should work on your 12. I love it
 
It’s telling that Apple immediately shows you how to disable it. That suggests it should have been off by default. Just wait, iOS 19 will force users into *ugh* threaded emails
 
  • Haha
Reactions: ignatius345
Is that option only for english language because I have croatian and I dont see categoryes just normal email app like before 18.2. I have iPhone 13.
 
ios Mail is totally broken on this iphone 12 Mini ios 18.2(22C152) - stuck on "Checking for Mail..." since day 1. I've been battling the thing since. I've wiped the phone and reinstalled (from itunes). I've reset everything from mail sever (Outlook...deleted the device there and re-added). REset every toggle I could find anywhere .So, then I installed Spark and boom all my emails instantly appear on phone - and fast.

Whatever happened to Golden Master? This is a Golden turd (again).
I turned off categories from the jump. ..then after a couple days battling the phone toggled categories on and boom 1/2 (not all) of my emails popped up. Some of them to appeared..still stuck on "Checking for Mail...". I toggled categories back off and poof emails gone/

I can only use iMac now for emails - they're there instantly.

What is the lightest (no bells and whistles), so-called-privacy oriented ios mail app? I'll use it instead.

(iphone 8 ios 16.7 works as expected - mail app like the old days)
 
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  • Wow
Reactions: DeepIn2U
Only one that interests me is the cat - promotions. I can then flag worthy ones and the rest get rid of far faster than looking at all mail.
 
Not impressed with 18.2 Mail.app - having lots of issues fetching mail, things get stuck at ‘Categorizing…’,* crashes… needs some more QA.

*A shame we cannot disable categorization, only hide it, this would fix it!
 
The one thing I can't figure out is turning it off doesn't revert to previous behaviour - when I'm looking at all mail on all inboxes before, it showed on each mail & what mailbox it was attached to i.e. iCloud - inbox.

That's gone now even turning off pictures etc.

Anyone any ideas how to get it back?
 


With iOS 18.2, Apple added a Categories view in the Mail app, which is designed to organize your incoming emails by type. Categories hasn't been receiving the best response from iPhone users, so we thought we'd check it out.


Mail Categories organizes your email inbox into the following sections: Primary for your most important messages, Transactions for your orders and receipts, Promotions for deals and offers, and Updates for news, subscriptions, and social.

When Mail Categories is enabled, your Primary inbox will be front and center, and then you can swipe over to see other emails that fall into the other categories. The idea is that emails that aren't important like newsletters and deals are tucked away, but there's also an added benefit of having all of your order receipts in one spot, or your emails about sales in one section of your inbox.

There's also a useful feature that aggregates all of the emails from a single sender into one view, so you can see all of your Amazon emails in one place, or everything you've received from an airline. To get to this view, you just need to tap into any email from that sender and then scroll up to see other messages.

The Primary inbox contains emails from other categories, and it's a feature that can make sense for someone with an overwhelming inbox, but it's not likely something that inbox zero people are going to like.

If you don't like Mail Categories, you can swap back over to List View by tapping on the three dots in the upper right corner of the Mail app, but if you do want to give Mail Categories a try, there are a couple tips worth noting.

To get to a view of your inbox with all emails in chronological order without swapping views, just swipe left on the category bar to get to the "All Mail" option.

It's not uncommon for an email to be sent to the wrong category, and if that happens, you can tap into the email, tap on the three dots in the upper right hand corner of the display, and then choose the Categorize Sender option to choose a category manually. If you're in the Primary inbox, though, you need to hit reply and then choose the Categorize Sender option.

When you tap into a message from a sender, you can delete all emails from that sender by using the three dots at the top right of the display and choosing the "Trash All" option.

What do you think of categories in Mail? Is it a feature you plan to use? Let us know in the comments below.

Article Link: iOS 18.2: Here's How Mail Categories Work
Without this simple explanation I just walked into “I can’t find the email I need” and turned it off.
 
It appears that there is a different mail message "reader" for all categories EXCEPT "Primary".
In other words, there's not ellipsis at the top of a Primary email message.
This is frustrating, b/c one main way of cleaning up you inbox would be to re-cat some Primary msgs into categories like "Promotions".

And sadly, iPadOS 18.2 has got none of this.

And just as sad: there's STILL no way for users to get the FULL email address of the sender. The iPhone remains the BEST email destination for phishing and scams.
Have you clicked the > from email address a few times? It works for me to see the sender’s full email address
 
Just realised if you keep tapping categories it ends up with an “all mail” tab.
 
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