Using Mac Mail Categories And How To Turn It Off

The new Mail Inbox Categories feature helps you get through your inbox by dividing messages into separate categories. You can manually control which senders end up in which categories. You also have two ways to view your inbox as it looked before.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Mail Categories feature in macOS.
So once you've upgraded to macOS Sequoia 15.4 Mail looks a little bit different. It's got something in it called Categories. Now these might not be completely new to you because previously they were available in iOS and iPad OS so you may have seen them there as well. This is the first time they are on the Mac. 
Basically what it looks like is this. In the Mail App you see these five buttons here at the top. The last one is just a little bit out of sight. These are five different ways of viewing you Inbox. So you either need to have all Inboxes selected or if you have multiple accounts you can select just one Inbox. But notice they won't appear in other situations, like if you look at your Archive, say, it's not there. So this is an Inbox feature. What this does is it attempts to make it easier to get through your Inbox by categorizing things in four different categories. 
There's Primary. Then there's Transactions. Then there is Updates. There is Promotions. That's how you can view each of these four things just by clicking here at the top. So what are they? Well, the Transactions one is going to try to show you receipts and things like that. You actually see a description of it here at the top. After the first time you review this you can Dismiss it and you won't be bothered with it again. The Updates one is for things like when you get regular newsletters or updates from some website. It puts them in there. The Promotions one is for special deals offers, coupons, that kind of thing. What Mail attempts to do is it attempts to categorize each mail that comes in as one of these things. The default collection is Primary. So in other words if it doesn't fit in one of those it's going to appear here in Primary. Also, sometimes if it does appear in one of those but it seems to be very important it will be in both Primary and in one of these three categories. 
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Now the categorization is automatic but you do have some control. For instance, let's say I want to move all emails from this person here into the Updates category. I can do that by Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger click on a trackpad on it and I should see Categorize Sender here. It should be set to Automatically but I can have it Always Categorize as one of these four. So it is just going to look at who the email is from and whenever you get a new email from that person it is going to go into one of these categories automatically. 
You can also do it up here by clicking on the name or email address that you see here. There is Categorize Sender there as well. If you find something is going into a category  and it shouldn't, like let's say you don't want these going into Transactions, and you can use the same techniques here to have it go to say Primary instead to make sure that it doesn't get into one of those other three buckets.
Unfortunately, there is no way to be more precise than that. You can't like filter based on keywords or some other content in the message. If you ever want to see the definitions for the different categories again you can go into View, there's About Categories here. This brings up this window and it describes each category again and gives you more information. For instance when a message goes into Transactions, Updates, or Promotions but includes time sensitive information, in other words the content in it seems to suggest a deadline of some sort, it will also appear in Primary, like I said before. 
You also have a button here to Reset all the manual configurations. So if you set a bunch of messages to manually go to a certain category and then find it is not working for you, you can use this button to get rid of all those and start again. 
Now as you can imagine in addition to a lot of people not caring either way for this new feature there are a lot of people that love it that have actually been asking for this and also a lot of people that hate it and immediately want to know how to go back to how it was before. There are actually two methods for doing that. One, allows you to keep the categories here at the top in case you want to use them but simply view things like they were before. Remember I said there was five buttons here and you can see this other one just out of sight. Well, the fifth one is actually All Mail. If you click on it, it reveals itself and Primary is condensed into a smaller button. Now you can see all messages here. This is the same as it was before. You still have the buttons here at the top so if you want to dig into one of these you can. But by sticking with All Mail, just leaving it like that, you have an Inbox that looks like it did before without completely turning the feature off. This is, in fact, how I have been using it with All Mail selected here but the buttons still active in case.
Here's another useful tip. You can use two-fingers on a trackpad and swipe to go between two of these. For instance, let's select Transactions here. If I swipe to the left it goes to All Mail. If I swipe to the right it goes to Transactions. If I select Primary instead then I can swipe back and forth across these buttons to go between Primary and All Mail. 
Now let's say you really do just want to completely get rid of it. Well you can do that pretty easily. You can go to View and then it is just a checkmark here, Show Mail Categories. You can also get to it with this three dots button which also has About Categories and you can turn off Show Mail Categories here as well. Then it goes away and it looks exactly like it did before but you can easily turn it On again if you ever want to give it another try. 
So it certainly isn't going to be for everybody. If it is not for you just it Off. If you think it might make getting through your daily email Inbox a little easier then give it a try over the next days and weeks. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Using Mac Mail Categories And How To Turn It Off”

Sheldon

2 weeks ago

Thanks bunches...my wife and I don't really like the categories feature so it is nice to know how to such it off...

Robert Salter

Is there an option to set (sync) the Mail Categories for all devices (sync between Mac, iPhone and iPad) or is the App category settings unique for each device. Do you know if the iCloud Mail Categorization option syncs the iCloud Mail options across all devices? Thank you

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: Not sure. What are you observing so far?

Keith

I use Gmail as my provider and the Apple mail client with IMAP. Of course, Gmail already categorizes my mail. For instance, promotions are filtered to a folder called "CatPromotions," and then they show up in my folder list. I turned off categories in the new mail client, but I wonder if you have a recommendation for using Gmail with the Apple client.

Daniel

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem to me. I tend to (at least try to) keep my inbox empty, so categorizing incoming emails is more of a hassle than a time-saver for me. You could argue that the Apple mail client already does some categorizing by identifying certain mails as junk; that, on the other hand, I find very useful, and I wish Mail on iOS and iPadOS did the same.

Keith: For me, I have the Gmail function off, and the Mail app function on. But it is almost always set to "All Mail" so I'm not really using it.

Astrid Strategier

1 week ago

Hello Gary, Thanks for all the info. It's very helpful.
I have a new iMac with the latest version of Sequoa 15.4 but I dons see the categories you are explaining. I live in Europe ( France) you think that's the reason or should I do something within the mail account? thank you

Astrid: It may very well be a language issue, yes.

Evelyn

I disabled this feature. Years ago I set up several email addresses with a server and each box has the functions of this category feature. One email address for newsletters, one for personal mail, etc. Works for me much better than this category feature.