A recent report by Mark Gurman in Bloomberg has presented a compelling prediction. It says that the automatic email categorization feature in Apple Mail, which made its debut with iOS 18 on the iPhone is ready to make its way to Macs and iPads in the upcoming months.
This functionality is expected to launch together with macOS 15.4 and potentially iPad 18.4 and both of these are expected in April. Much like the server-side of Gmail sorting which was introduced in May 2013, Apple’s Mail app on iOS organizes emails into different categories. These categories include ‘Primary,’ ‘Transactions,’ ‘Updates’ and ‘Promotions’.
Users can generally adjust the categorization for a specific sender by manually moving an email to a different category, however, the ability to create new categories or modify the sorting criteria is unavailable.
Some users might favor the straightforwardness of a single stream of messages instead of sifting through four different inboxes to catch any misclassified emails or focusing on the important ones. At the same time, others find the sorting feature on iOS beneficial.
Interestingly, unlike many of Apple’s recent OS-level features, the email sorting function does not require a device equipped with Apple’s advanced hardware (generally M-series Macs or iPads). It operates entirely on the device itself and its feature option is optional and is limited to emails in English.
Just a few days ago, Apple rolled out a third beta of macOS 15.3, hinting that early developer versions of macOS 15.4, complete with the sorting feature are just weeks away.
While the newsletter of Gurman indicates that this mil sorting will be integrated into the Mail app for iPadOS, he did not mention which version it would be accompanying. Although, the timing suggests that it would be near the launch of iPadOS 18.4.