The Mail app includes a tabbed system that automatically sorts emails into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions to help us manage our inbox more easily. It’s a clever system that lets us focus on what really matters, but sometimes we might want to turn it off to view our inbox in a continuous, chronological list without filters. Fortunately, it’s very easy to do. Let’s take a look.
What Mail categories offer and why we might want to disable them
The new category system uses on-device machine learning to display priority emails in the Primary tab and sort the rest into their respective sections. Receipts and confirmations go into Transactions, newsletters and reminders into Updates, and offers into Promotions.
On devices with Apple Intelligence, urgent messages are also highlighted with a special marker and placed at the top of the list so we can easily spot and respond to them.
How to switch to list view temporarily
If at any point we prefer a linear timeline, we can easily switch between the categorised view and the classic list. How? We have two options:
- Swipe left across the category tabs until we reach All Mail.
- Double-tap the active tab to instantly switch the view.
Whether we're using an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, we’ll immediately see the inbox with each message in chronological order. Returning to any of the category tabs will resume the smart sorting, so we can switch back and forth knowing it's just a temporary view.
How to permanently hide categories
If we prefer Mail to always open in the traditional list view, we can turn off the segmented layout in just a couple of taps:
- On iPhone or iPad, tap the More button (represented by three dots) in the top-right corner of the inbox and choose List View.
- On Mac, click the same More button and uncheck Show Mail Categories.
If we want to bring back the automatic organisation later on, we just repeat the steps and turn the categories back on.
Having a system that intelligently helps us manage our inbox is genuinely useful. But for those times when—for whatever reason—we prefer an unfiltered view, it's just one tap away. What’s clear is that Apple Intelligence makes Mail better and lets us do more with it, more easily than ever.
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