Email Categories in iOS 18.2: Not Really Smart

As part of iOS 18.2, Apple has implemented a new feature that at first glance seems practical in its official Mail application: the app now – even without Apple Intelligence – automatically sorts incoming messages to keep a better overview. Can sort into different categories. The function, called “Classification” in German, recognizes a total of four types of emails: “Primary” (“urgent emails or the latest messages from contacts”), “Transactional” (such as payment confirmations and order updates, Apple writes), “Updates” (newspapers and social media) and “Advertisements” (advertisements “from companies and organizations”). Problem: The sorting is not really precise, in English as well as German. Anyone who has this feature activated is at risk of not hearing important messages.

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“Primary” as a news center.

Once mail classification is activated, the “Primary” category becomes the message center that most users are likely to focus on. Conversely, it means you pay less attention to other categories because you have to actively call them up. Therefore it is important that sorting works correctly. Unfortunately, this does not happen constantly in everyday life. When I tried it myself, some emails fell into the “Advertising” category that definitely didn’t belong there.

The annoying thing is that you can only tell the app after a few steps that it made a mistake: you have to re-categorize the sender of the email using the “…” menu (after replying to this in the “Primary” field Menu possible). However, Apple Mail only depends on the sender, but not on the content of the email: it is quite possible that you will receive emails from a sender that is not “primary”.

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Overall, it’s a good idea to test email classification before leaving it on all the time. Apple is also likely to make improvements internally – but it’s unclear whether this will be possible outside of the next iOS update. If you can’t handle the categorization at all, it’s best to go back to list view.

It seems that Apple is not completely convinced with this feature yet. The group has so far only implemented the classification under iOS 18.2, but has not equipped iPadOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 with it. Recently there have been reports again that Apple Mail is causing problems under iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 for other reasons: emails cannot be reliably recovered.

(B.Sc.)