Apple unveiled one of its biggest updates to the Mail app in June. The changes include an all-new design, improvements to Apple Intelligence, and a number of other quality of life improvements. While most of the non-AI features aren’t in beta yet, Apple currently says we can expect everything “later this year.”
Categorization
With on-device processing, the Mail app in iOS 18 sorts your emails into different categories. Personal conversations and time-sensitive emails fall into the “Primary” category, but there are also transactions, updates, and promotions.
Things like receipts and order confirmations will be sorted into transactions, newsletters and social media notifications into updates, while ads and marketing will be sorted into promotions. There will also be an “All Emails” tab where you can see everything in chronological order.
Digest view
In iOS 18, the Mail app groups your emails by sender. For example, if you click on an email from United, you can see all your emails from that company. This makes it easy to find important details from the past without having to fiddle with searching.
This feature only seems to work within email categories, so if you sort all emails, you won’t benefit from it. However, if a company is sorted into the wrong category, you can also just move it. For example, if a sender is showing up in “Promotions” but you actually want them in “Primary,” you can just move them.
Highlight unread emails
Within the categories of the new Mail app, you can easily distinguish between new and old emails. Newer, unread emails appear at the top, while older and read emails remain at the bottom.
Intelligent answer
Apple Intelligence enables a new email feature called Smart Reply. When you reply to a new email and use one of Apple Intelligence’s prompts above your keyboard, it will generate a reply to the email and address all the key points of the email. You will also be prompted for input where necessary so that Apple Intelligence can respond appropriately to anything in the original email.
Unlike everything described above, this is available in the iOS 18.1 beta.
Although this feature is system-wide and not specific to the Mail app, Apple particularly highlights the writing tools used in the Mail app. With the writing tools, you can ask Apple Intelligence to help you make an email sound friendlier, more professional, or more concise. You can also ask it to generate key points from your text, proofread it, or rewrite it entirely.
Email summaries
With Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1, the Mail app can provide a quick summary of each email right from the list view, saving you time and avoiding having to open each individual email when you don’t need to.
You can also see a more detailed summary if you actually tap on the email, which is still much more concise than if you read the entire email. Apple Intelligence isn’t perfect, though, so I’d still recommend reading the entire email if it’s an important matter.
Priority messages
Starting with iOS 18.1, the new Mail app also places all your priority messages at the top. An email is considered priority if it is time-sensitive, such as an invitation to an event, checking in for a flight, or canceling a meeting.
Our opinion
The new Mail app, unveiled at WWDC24, is pretty nice, although it’s a shame that none of the non-AI features like categorization are present in the beta. Also, in the iOS 18.1 beta, the app still has the old design and not the one shown at WWDC.
It’s cool that Apple Intelligence features like Priority Messages and Writing Tools are available in beta, but it seems like it’ll be a while before we see everything else. Hopefully it will be included in iOS 18.2 towards the end of the year, unless Apple delays it.
What do you think of the new Mail app? Let us know in the comments below.
FTC: We use income generating auto affiliate links. More.
