Mail categories
December 23, 2024 at 12:25 PM by Dr. Drang
The release of iOS 18.2 has come with a release of anger at how the Mail app is handling our email. There was this post by Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels and this one by Joe Rosensteel at Six Colors (with a followup at his own place). The unsurprising conclusion is that the company who makes Siri doesn’t do a great job at categorizing your email.
Both Stephen and Joe cover one of the things you can do to get Mail to present your mail the way it used to: by tapping the three-dot menu in the upper right corner of the messages view and switching from Categories to List.
But this, I learned, isn’t enough. One of the Apple Intelligence features that came along with mail categorization is the “don’t you worry your pretty little head about it” setting for Mail notifications. In a nutshell, this setting makes the badge on the Mail icon show only the count of messages that AI categorizes as Primary. And of course, Apple has this setting turned on by default because you’re just going to love its categorization.
I thought that changing from Categories View to List View would be enough to let AI know that I wanted all of my unread messages to be counted in the badge. But no. I still had to open the Settings app and work my way through until I reached the screen that let me switch the badge to show the count of all unread messages.
With this change, I’m basically back to where I was before iOS 18.2. There are other new settings that allow Apple Intelligence to learn from Mail, and I’ve kept them turned on. I remain hopeful that AI in Mail will be useful to me in a year or two, and the training it does between now and then may help.
Update 23 Dec 2024 10:20 PM
Joe talks about the badge problem and how to fix it in his Six Colors post. I missed it on my first read because it’s in the part of his post where he tries to explain the essentially unexplainable distinction Apple makes between Primary and Priority emails. My apologies to Joe.