Keeping our inboxes organized often feels like an overwhelming task.

If you’re fortunate, yours contains only messages from people you wish to communicate with. Realistically, though, most are cluttered with newsletters, receipts, social media digests, and more. These emails aren’t necessarily spam, but they complicate the process of quickly sifting through to find the messages we want to see.

This week, Apple introduced a feature to the Mac that aims to help cut through inbox clutter by automatically organizing messages into smart categories. The feature is new in the Mail app in macOS 15.4 and comes several months after Apple debuted the feature on the iPhone in iOS 18.2. Here’s how to use it.

As of this week, the new Mail categories features are available on all Macs, iPhones, and iPads that are capable of running the latest operating systems. That’s macOS 15.4, iOS 18.2, and iPadOS 18.2 and later.

The central concept behind Mail categories is that it uses on-device processing—meaning Apple is not reading anything—to sort your emails into five categories:

Primary: Signified by a blue banner, this category displays personal messages to you as well as any messages with time-sensitive information (like a flight change notice).
Transactions: Signified by a green banner, this category displays emails that contain receipts, such as from Amazon, shipping notices, and confirmations.
Updates: Signified by a purple banner, this category contains all your newsletters, social media roundup digests, and more.
Promotions: Signified by a pink banner, this category contains emails that relate to advertisements, such as an email from Target drawing your attention to its upcoming sale.
All Mail: Signified by a black banner, this category shows you every email in your inbox in chronological order, including those from the categories above.

By clicking or tapping on any of the category banners, you will quickly see all the emails that fit into that category displayed in your inbox. This can help decrease the time it takes you to find the email you’re looking for and eliminate the need to sort your emails yourself.

As excited as many people are about Apple’s new Mail categories feature, it’s worth noting that Apple isn’t exactly innovating here. Google’s Gmail has offered automatic email categorization for years.

How to use Apple’s new Mail category feature

The best thing about Apple’s new Mail category feature on Mac, iPhone, and iPad is that it’s pretty much automatic. Once you have the email app set up to display categories, Apple’s email client will do everything.