I’ve used Apple’s Mail app for years on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but the recently added inbox categories were a mixed bag for me until I started using one hidden feature regularly.
Apple’s Mail app lets you manually categorize where senders go in your inbox
For most of my 15+ years of using Apple devices, the default Mail app has remained surprisingly consistent.
That recently changed, with some of the biggest changes to Mail coming in iOS 18. One of particular note is the introduction of a new inbox categorization system.
Mail now automatically filters messages into four categories:
- Primary
- Transaction
- Update
- Promotional event
If you receive a lot of email, categories can be a useful tool to tame your inbox.
But for me, a few confusing choices on the feature side frustrated me at first. There were senders from whom I regularly read messages and sometimes even returned them, who somehow did not make it to the Primary.
My frustration made me want a fix—and luckily, Apple offers one.
If you swipe left after any message in your inbox and then tap “Next,” you can scroll down to find the “Categorize Sender” action.
After pressing Categorize Sender, you have the option to manually select which category this sender’s messages will go to.
So if there’s someone important you never want to miss a message from, you can have all their communications delivered to Primary.
Or, on the other hand, if the sender is still mistakenly placed in a different category that doesn’t make sense to you, you can easily fix this for all future messages.
The ability to manually categorize senders made Mail’s new inbox much more useful to me. Without it, I’d probably turn the feature off completely. But now I could still benefit from what it has to offer.
Do you use mail inbox categories and ever need to manually categorize? Let us know in the comments.
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