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iOS 18.2 Includes Revamped Mail App With Built-In Categorization

Shin-Ra said:
In this case the mail provider is iCloud.

Read all mail on one device and it clears (zeroes) the unread badge on that device but none of the others.
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Do you have your mail setup to push/fetch with a reasonable frequency?
 
Ok I really don't like this. Reminds of social Media feeds where THEY think they know my inbox (feed) better than myself. I don't even use folders on Outlook for work. I usually go "this was around may 2021, let me look back". Just give me chronological order.

Back to basics list view for me
 
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contacos said:
Pretty awful so far (beta I know) but the categories are all over the place like according to Apple, my Wordpress login is „Promotion“ 😅 also hard to understand what the images next to an email are supposed to mean
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I figured this would be the case initially. This will certainly require some machine learning, which will be accelerated now that it's in the hands of millions of beta testers. Will still take some time for accuracy to be near perfect though.
 
contacos said:
Pretty awful so far (beta I know) but the categories are all over the place like according to Apple, my Wordpress login is „Promotion“ 😅 also hard to understand what the images next to an email are supposed to mean
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It literally says that it will improve over time, yet you still complain about it!
 
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Yrmmont said:
I just want a way to delete spam mail and never see it again. Block sender doesn’t work and spam merely piles up in the junk folder.
Come on Timmy…I’m sure AI can handle this!
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So much this. Mail.app spam filtering is terrible. This seems like such an obvious use case for AI.
 
john123 said:
I hate to be one of “those” people (negative and dismissive), but there’s absolutely nothing new here at all. Every single thing has been available for a while now via one tool or another. The “innovation” is packaging and integrating it. That’s of course valuable, and I guess for less technically adept people it is game changing. But for someone with technical acumen…well, let’s just say I’m not dying to upgrade my iPhone 14 Pro because of this.
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If you're doing entirely new stuff, you're not innovating, you're inventing.

Apple is best at innovating and pretty lousy at inventing.
 
I find this feature very interesting. I hope it works as well (or better) than the email program "Spark". I could possibly switch back to Apple Mail. (Thunderbird lacks such a sorting function).
 
oneMadRssn said:
It would be cool if you can pin your own categories to the top, maybe as a form of saved searches. For example, it would be useful to have a button at the top to show all emails from my boss.
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this.

in apple's documentation about Mail it says that you can use Smart folders in Mail. i looked and looked for the capability of how to make smart folders in iOS mail. there is none. other than the pre-set ones that apple makes such as Today, or, Flagged, or things like that. disingenuous of apple to use the term smart folders to mean only what it determines to be smart folders.

the mail catagories that 18.1 seems to have are so limited they are sure to be of no actual use in my actual workflow.

but i am hopeful that the next iteration of Mail (after 18.2) allows us to be able to make this kind of actual ad hoc smart folder. it seems like the next step.
as macOS mail has had since forever.
 
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CaptainV said:
I wish the junk filtering would be better.
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I find it excellent. Did you know you can train it so it learns from your preferences? If mail in junk is moved to inbox, or vice versa, then mail will remember that and filter accordingly.
 
I’m sure this is nice, but I really wish Apple would extend Finder tags to Mail so I can label files and email using the same system...
 
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This was one of the most interesting things from WWDC for me. If they can use AI to help clean up my mail and let me focus on actionable items in my Primary inbox that would be fantastic. Consider me cautiously optimistic.
 
rjjacobson said:
You can turn it off for regular list view if you do not want to use it. It is only on iPhone mail not available yet that I can see on my iPadOS 18.2
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Also finding categorization in 18.2 only on iPhone and not on iPad, both pro latest hardware.
 
I hope there’s a way to switch this off. I’ve no interest in this feature and have it turned off on Gmail. Good for people that find it useful, but it’s just not for me.
 
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It sounds like Apple could have just provided the same kind of conditional functionality for iOS that's already been available for macOS for many years now.

Rules.

I always wondered why Apple never made the connection between Mail rules on macOS and iOS. If you make a rule on macOS, why can't that be applied to your iOS/iPadOS devices and managed via iCloud settings as well? Why all the hoopla about AI this, AI that? Are iOS devices computationally unable to process simple mail filtering conditions onboard, or is it just that Apple devs thought it would be too difficult or a niche use case for the arguably less tech-savvy public that are using iPads and iPhones?

I've been taking advantage of Mail rules on macOS for over a decade, and I would be surprised if Apple staff and management haven't been doing the same to categorize and filter out customer e-mails vs. junk.
 
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