Apple Intelligence: Mail Categorization

Apple has gotten into what society is calling “Artificial Intelligence”, or “AI”, except they have put their own spin on the term. One of Apple’s core tenets is protecting user privacy, and they attempt to do so whenever possible. In order to accomplish this, Apple attempts to protect user privacy through a combination of performing as many requests on the device as possible. However, for advanced requests that may not always be possible. For those requests there is a feature called Private Cloud Compute. Private Cloud Compute is a set of servers run by Apple that are capable of handling your request, providing the result, and then the server is completely erased. If you need more details, be sure to check out the post that is the Introduction to Apple Intelligence.

Apple is releasing the Apple Intelligence features in batches. The first set of features released were done so in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. The second set of Apple Intelligence features are being released with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2. There are four new features for this set of features. This article will cover “Mail Categorization”.

If you are anything like me, you have a bunch of different email accounts. You may have one account that you set up a long time ago and has become nothing but spam, and another that you use for everyday use, and maybe another that is for a specific purpose. No matter how many email accounts you have, it is likely that you get a lot of email messages. The emails may be order notifications, newsletters, or even promotions.

What would be useful is being able to put emails into various groups or categories. Apple Intelligence on iOS 18.2 can do just that. Mail Categorization will put your emails into one of four different categories. These categories are:

• Transactions
• Updates
• Promotions
• Primary

Let us look at each in turn, starting with Transactions.

Transactions

The “Transactions” category will have any orders that you have made, including things like delivery notifications. These are grouped by sender. What this means is that all of the messages from a specific vendor will be grouped together so you can see them all in one place. Here is an example of what that might look like:

Promotions

The “Promotions” category is meant for advertisements. Just like the other

Mail App Badge

When you have Mail Categorization enabled, as well as badges on your Mail app, by default only the emails in the “Primary” category will badge the app icon. However, if you would like, you can change this to be “All” mail. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Open Settings
2. Scroll down to “Apps”.
3. Tap on “Apps” to open the app list.
4. Scroll down to “Mail”.
5. Tap on “Mail” to open up Mail’s app preferences.
6. Tap on “Notifications” to bring up the Notifications section.
7. Tap on “Customize Notifications” to bring up notifications options.
8. Under Badges tap on “All Unread Messages”.

Once you select this option, the badge for the Mail app will show whenever there is an unread message in one of your email accounts. This would be the same behavior as Mail exhibited in iOS 18.1. This means that anything that is in a folder or Junk Mail will not be shown.

Disabling Categorization

If you enable Apple Intelligence and find that Mail Categorization is not for you, there is an option to disable it. This can be done by performing the following steps:

1. Open the Mail app.
2. Tap on “All Inboxes”, or any individual inbox.
3. Tap on the “…” button in the upper corner. A popup will appear.
4. Tap on “List View”.

Once you enable list view, this will be just like Mail under iOS 18.1, which means no categorization. It should be noted that this can be done on an account-by-account basis. This means that you can enable categorization for one email account but not for another. This means that you can customize the Mail app in a manner that works best for you.

My Thoughts

After having used mail categorization for a while, I am on the precipice of actually disabling it. The primary reason for this is not because of any categorization missteps, but because I prefer to take care of all of my emails, and the badging does not always show when I have a new email. Because of this, I end up not seeing mail until I open it again. This is my personal preference for how I handle email. This is likely because I do not get a lot of email; at least that is not already filtered by SPAM filters. Therefore, I do not necessarily have the need to automatically categorize emails as others might need to.

To a much lesser extent, the fact that Mail Categorization is only available on the iPhone is a big misstep from Apple. I understand that the iPhone is the biggest platform, but having feature parity, particularly when it comes to experiences that are cross-platform, is imperative for some users. Having some mail categorized and some not may cause some users to disable the feature and never re-enable it.

Closing Thoughts

The ability to have email automatically categorized is a good addition to iOS. Unfortunately, it is only available on the iPhone at this time. It may expand to iPadOS and macOS at some point in the future, but Apple has not indicated any plans for that to occur.

While Apple Intelligence tries to properly categorize your incoming email, it may not always get things correct. In those instances, you can recategorize any incoming message, and it should be properly categorized in the future.

It should be reiterated that Mail Categorization is only available on iOS. It is not available on iPadOS nor on macOS. Therefore, on iPadOS and macOS, those apps will behave as they did previously.

Be sure to check out all of the other articles in the Apple Intelligence series.