iOS 18.2 Mail is a misfire
Out of all the new features in iOS 18.2, I really didn’t expect that I’d be writing about Mail of all things. And yet, given how many times a day I use Mail on my iPhone, the changes in Mail in iOS 18.2 might be the worst thing about the release.
I’ve used Mail for iOS since I had a first-generation iPod Touch. The Mail team has maintained the app so that it has always functioned well enough, even though it lacked features. Unfortunately, they’ve now begun adding features, and it’s no longer functioning well enough.
Scattergories
iOS 18.2 introduces Categories in Mail, and I think the entire concept is completely incompatible with my brain and my experience with other email clients (including previous versions of Mail for iOS). I’m trying to be flexible and not immediately dismiss new stuff out of hand, but that positive attitude is at odds with my desire not to make something in my life more difficult just because someone else thinks they’ve got a hot, new take on things.
Allow me to explain my boring approach to email: I have several personal email accounts. (Any employer-assigned email accounts have been siloed off in other apps, like Outlook or Gmail.) I leave all my read emails in the Inbox and don’t move things out because the chronological “feed” of email helps me revisit old emails in a way I can’t if I moved them to folders.1
Obviously, this mentality is somewhat incompatible with Apple’s bold approach to Categories. The good news is that each category isn’t a folder that moves my message from my inbox. The bad news is that the interface behaves completely differently depending on how Mail categorizes your email.
The Primary category features messages that the Mail app deemed important. If the app considers emails from other categories time-sensitive, they can also appear here. If an email from another category appears in Primary, it will have a little icon of the category it also appears in.
Primary is the only category used with the Priority feature, which scans messages and marks those of special importance. This feature shipped with iOS 18.1. Under the menu in the upper right, Priority can be toggled off separately from everything else. Priority is not Primary, but it only lives in Primary. Got it?
Primary is also the only category that will show a badge on the Mail icon by default, but you’ll still receive notifications for all messages in all categories.
Confusingly, the categories that don’t count towards the badge notification or unread mail count get little dots next to their icons when they contain new mail. But that’s the only place you see those dots—they don’t display as a count anywhere, and new also doesn’t mean the same thing as unread (more on that later).
When you’re looking at the Mailboxes view of all your mail accounts and their inboxes/folders, items will only display an unread count if they contain messages that are marked as Primary. If a message is categorized as anything else, the list will appear as if you’ve read all your mail in all your inboxes.
It is my strong personal opinion that the unread count in the Mailboxes view should reflect the unread count of the emails you have in those mailboxes. Suppressing badges so you can focus is unrelated to whether or not a message is unread. I know why people want to hide badges and notifications because they’re drowning in mail, but oftentimes, I just want to see where an unread message lives.
To get a full unread count and return to normal badges, you need to go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail and then scroll down to Customize Notifications. You can choose to list the unread messages in Primary or all unread messages. That’s it. You can’t exclude Promotions, or only include Primary and Updates. Primary or all are your choices.
The Transactions view supposedly puts all my transactional emails together. Fine. Except, for some reason, my informed delivery emails from the United States Postal Service appear under Transactions. I didn’t buy my mail!
I don’t know why deliveries appear here. Some deliveries are connected to transactions, but not all. Strangely, emails I receive about packages that are out for delivery today are somehow not considered time-sensitive enough to appear in Primary as well as Transactions.
Updates is apparently where some (but not all!) of my newsletters go, along with terms of service updates, flight emails, and explanations of benefits from my healthcare provider. It’s basically everything from a business or business-like entity, that isn’t directly about money or a delivery.
That seems fine, I guess, except that’s a really broad category that has the full spectrum of things that I’d like to know about, ranging from sooner to later. I can move a sender from here to Primary if I want it to alert me sooner, but that’s a powerful all-or-nothing decision that will cover every email that the sender ever sends and has sent. It doesn’t train the system that this kind of email from this sender is important. Choose wisely if you think something is more important than “Updates.”
Promotions is where you’ll find Deals! Deals! Deals! Honestly, this category makes me think this whole thing about my email disappearing into three oubliettes might be worth it. Unfortunately, several of the newsletters I subscribe to are in this category, including the Six Colors newsletter. Perhaps it is overly aggressive in relegating senders to this category—almost like there’s a total lack of precision—which makes me not trust it at all.
For a day, I let messages accumulate in this category and only dealt with my Primary inbox, Updates, and Transactions. That’s what it’s for, right? To keep you from being distracted by these unimportant promotions?
Except when I did finally dive in to Promotions, I had to go through and read the subject and AI summary for each one to figure out if I trusted it enough to mark the email as read or not, or if I really needed to read it anyway. This didn’t save me any time. It’s not like there were hundreds of these promotional emails. The day after that, I started worrying something valuable was in Promotions, so I ended up checking it anyway. Net result: It created more work rather than saving me time.
Group project
The quirky new Grouped Messages feature applies to all categories except Primary and All Mail (where messages can not be grouped by sender, for some reason).
Tapping on a message, like the one I got from the USPS, leads to a view of all messages from that sender. However, the header for that view takes up a large portion of the screen. There’s a header image for the sender, which heavily pads the email address or name of the sender. (It also occasionally lops off descenders on letters, apparently. Guess they needed more room.)
The subject line of a message is truncated with an ellipsis feature, which is frustrating, given how much space is being wasted by this view. (Why would I need to know what the email is about when I can see a huge circle with a graphic in it and an enormous version of the sender’s name or address?)
Sometimes, the entire message at the end of a group of messages is displayed, and sometimes, there’s a “See more” to expand the message. I got here by tapping on this message from the Category view, why won’t it show me the whole message like if I tapped to get to the message from the Priority or All Mail view? Shouldn’t the last email in a bundle always be fully expanded because it’s the thing I tapped on to open this bundle view in the first place? There’s infinite room below it! This isn’t saving any space!
That truncated view could theoretically be useful if you’re going back up in the bundle and expanding those to find a previous email from the Sender, as if it was a threaded chain of email replies instead of individual messages. Except… when I scroll back up, it expands the entire message for each message fully. I can’t even expand it to just see the full subject line and close it again.
Speaking of closing it again, I can’t find any way to do that other than force-quitting Mail. Tapping the subject stub, which had expanded the item, doesn’t collapse it, but expands the subject stub so you can tap the email addresses. Long-pressing doesn’t do anything. There has to be a way to collapse messages in this view, but I honestly can’t figure it out.
Refusing categorization
If you’re in the truncated, padded bundle view, you can tap the ellipsis button in the upper right corner to change the sender’s category. However, this will change the categorization of every message the sender has sent or will send. Sometimes, a single sender sends me Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Some companies split these into different email addresses, and others don’t or don’t reliably.
And remember, if you move a sender from Transactions, Updates, or Promotions to Primary, you no longer get the bundle view of the sender. Why? I don’t know. I thought that view was supposed to be helpful?
That also means you don’t get the ellipsis button in the upper right to move the Sender. However, you can tap the Reply icon in the bottom bar of a message, which brings up that ridiculous menu, and scroll down to Categorize Sender to once again change all of the emails from that sender. That’s how email rules and filters should work, right?
People have asked for filters/rules for years for Mail on iOS, and Apple didn’t give them to us… until, all of a sudden, we’ve got a few hard-coded invisible rules that users can nudge a little. We can’t be trusted with Smart Mailboxes or labels, but we do have three immutable categories that all email is supposed to fit into.
Why can’t I make a category called Deliveries and elect for it to be worthy of the unread badge? Why can’t I make a category called Newsletters that’s silently delivered but not lumped in with all non-business related mails and get around to reading them just after I die?
Or you could give up…
Now that we’ve got categories, there’s got to be a way to temporarily not view them. This is the All Mail category, which is hidden off to the right side of the other categories, so you don’t even know it’s there unless you swipe on those categories to reveal it. Surprise!
This view doesn’t expose any of the category features. It doesn’t put little icons next to mail items to let you know those messages are also in Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, like the Primary category does. Why not? It can’t group notifications by sender. It seemingly doesn’t have Priority either since there’s no option in the right ellipsis button menu to turn it off.
It’s basically like temporarily embedding the old List View underneath all the other Category items. Since you can just tap the ellipsis (top right) and List View to leave Categories behind, I’m unclear why the All Mail category also exists. If it worked in a way that also integrated categories, it would make more sense. But it doesn’t.
(If you’ve got multiple email accounts and you leave the All Inboxes view, you’ll find that your individual Inboxes have Categories of their own too. That’s fine, but Mail will also remember the category you were last in in that particular inbox. If you jump from All Inboxes, All Mail to your Gmail Inbox, it might be set to Updates, and you might not see an expected message because you have to remember that the category isn’t a setting that persists as a view across all inboxes when you move around the interface. It can be quite disorienting.)
The escape hatch for all of this categorical goodness is simply to give up and return to the classic List View. That should really be the default instead of this first attempt at Categories.
Think back to major changes in email clients you’ve used over the years. Almost all of them have been controversial because people are used to the current way of doing things. Their life, or their job, isn’t about learning new approaches to this mundane necessity.
That is why they nag users of the old version to try the new version while reassuring them they can go back. Over time, this becomes a matter of sticking them in the new version and telling them they can go back to the old version. Then, the new version becomes the only version. Rinse and repeat.
Apple skipped the opt-in step, which I suspect will engender far more ire than had they gone the traditional route. There will always be people who are resistant to any change, but this release strategy isn’t helping. What’s worse, there’s no universal “go back” switch people can flip. Some of the feature toggles are in Settings, and some are in hidden menu buttons inside the Mail app.
I had to walk my boyfriend through the steps to get List View back, turn off Priority, and to turn off all summarization because he hated it. I’m sticking with it for a little while longer, but I don’t know if I’ll make through Christmas before bailing.
As iOS 18.2 rolls out more widely, people are going to find themselves challenged by having to change their years-old or decades-old habits for an email client that thinks your package delivery for today is a non-time-sensitive transaction, and your newsletters are promotions. I’m not convinced people will have a ton of patience to try to calibrate this system, and adjust themselves to it. (And let’s not forget, these features still don’t exist on your iPad or Mac, eliminating one of the advantages of using the same app on different platforms.)
Mail on iOS is pretty important to Apple’s plans for on-device intelligence. A lot of what an AI can know about you is gleaned from your text messages, calendar appointments, and most importantly, email. If people ditch Mail out of frustration, it undermines the value proposition of the iPhone.
I hope that Apple moves quickly in the new year to correct some of these issues. In the meantime, all of us expert users will get another Christmas in the trenches helping loved ones figure out how to get Mail to work the way they expect it to.
- You will not change my mind. I do not need tips. I don’t care about your system. Leave me alone. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.