Apple delivered a notable upgrade to the Mail app a few weeks ago, introducing intelligent categories to keep the inbox uncluttered and make discovery of relevant content easier. The trick, however, was limited to the mobile platform, and never appeared on Macs.
That is about to change soon. In the latest edition of his PowerOn newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Mail categories will finally make an appearance in the desktop client this April.
The report notes that the change will arrive with the macOS 15.4 update. A few days ago, Apple released the third beta of macOS 15.3, which means a test build of macOS 15.4 is still a few weeks away.
Categories essentially sort all your emails into four classes. The Primary label is for personal communication and time-sensitive stuff, Promotions category is for sales and deals, Updates deals mostly with social and news stuff, while Transactions is the hub for shopping-related alerts.
If users deem it useful, they can change the email category for any sender in their inbox. Of course, if the categorization system is misfiring, users will be able to turn it off, as well, by simply toggling back to the classic List view.
Apple Intelligence has already made its way to the Mac platform across different destinations, including Mail. Some of the AI-driven features already available in the Mail app include Smart Reply, Priority Messages, email summarization, and summary previews.
Another notable Apple Intelligence perk in Mail is the arrival of Writing Tools. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT stack, it allows users to compose, refine, rewrite, proofread, and reorganize text content.
The email categorization system, however, has received a mixed reception. On one hand, it makes the whole inbox a lot more organized, neatly sorting emails, and putting all the important conversations in their own unified container.
A healthy few users, however, have already grown wary of it on their iPhones, and have been hunting for ways to get the old format back. Yet, the desire to do so is not merely aesthetic, but also driven by functional snags.
This is what Digital Trends’ Bryan M. Wolfe wrote after trying the categorization system:
“After upgrading to iOS 18.2 and encountering the new Mail Categories feature, I quickly realized that it complicated rather than simplified my digital life. I noticed that some emails that should have gone to my Primary inbox ended up in random categories instead.”
Moreover, the system is quite rigid, as you can’t quite create a fifth (or more) unique category for your emails. If the Bloomberg report turns out to be true, Apple still has some time on its hands to assess the early feedback and fix the existing woes before rolling out categories in the Mail client for Macs.
