It’s fair to say Apple’s revamp of mail for iOS has not all been smooth sailing. Complaints about the new email filters have led to many people turning them off and AI summaries, created with Apple Intelligence, have proven to be only moderately useful. But Apple will push out a new version of Mail during the first quarter of 2025 as part of macOS Sequoia 15.4. Here’s what we can expect.
With the current version of macOS sitting at 15.2 and 15.3 in beta testing, we can expect macOS 15.4 to arrive in about April 2025. With that release, we’ll see email categories arriving.
We can expect macOS to see the same categories as iPhone Mail. By default, email will be filtered into five categories. These are
- Primary
- Transactions
- Updates
- Promotions
- All Mail
How well categorised messages are is dependent on Apple Intelligence doing its job well – something that it has not managed to do perfectly.
The problem with automated email categorisation
I’ve never met two people that use email clients in exactly the same way. Some people like to use lots of rules to move messages into folders. Others use flags. Some prefer to have everything in one big bucket and rely on search functions to find things. Yet others use the Inbox Zero approach.
Apple’s approach, which mimics Gmail to some extent, assumes people want their email categorised the same way. I’m not convinced that Apple’s approach is the right way. By setting default categories Apple is dictating how we work.
As someone that uses Apple Mail for business, the categories simply do not work. I already have a system that works for me and Apple’s default categories are simply not fit for purpose. Given that Apple’s junk mail filtering doesn’t work particularly well, I’m not surprised that its attempts at categorisation on the iPhone have been mixed at best.
As one commenter at 9to5Mac put it:
It’s one of those things that sounded good to the developers and Marketing people, “Let AI sort your mail for you”, but actually makes things harder and makes it easier to lose mail.
Fortunately, you can turn off Apple Intelligence‘s efforts at summarising email in macOS.
I don’t want email categorisation
Automating email categorisation in Apple Mail is a solution looking for a problem. I suspect Apple is looking at the success of email apps like Superhuman and wondering how it can potentially Sherlock.
The challenge with email is that is is now decades old and most of the interface issues have been resolved. When you look at email clients, they all share similar features. Standards like IMAP have simplified interoperability between mobile, desktop and web clients. So Apple, and others, are left with the challenge of finding solutions to problems people haven’t yet noticed.
Email categorisation, as it stands today, is in the earliest beta stage. I’d suggest it’s probably at an alpha stage of development. Until Apple, or someone else, cracks the nut on how to create custom categories that are generated per user rather than a universal default today’s efforts will be an annoyance and not a feature.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.