You’ll Have Four Inboxes to Check

One of the most significant advantages of Apple Mail on the iPhone is that it’s fast and efficient. Apple has designed it so you can scan everything in your inbox and quickly archive, delete, or move messages with only a few swipes. There’s even a really handy one-tap filter that can show you all your read and flagged messages. Combine that with services like iCloud or Fastmail that support push notifications, and it’s the fastest way to stay on top of your email on the go.

Mail Categorization risks breaking that efficiency. Instead of seeing all of your emails in a single list, you get a Primary view that shows you only what Mail considers important. You need to tap on the other icons to see what’s been filed elsewhere: a shopping cart for Transactions, a conversation bubble for Updates, and a megaphone for Promotions.

This is fine if you truly want to leave those categories alone most of the time, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to stay on top of everything in your inbox (like I am), you’ll find there’s a lot more tapping or swiping is needed to see everything.

Apple has added a bit of secret sauce here in the form of a fifth “All Mail” category that shows up if you tap on the active category or swipe over to the right side of the category icons. Pulling this up gives you the same view of your inbox as you’d see with categories disabled, but I find myself flipping over there so often that I’ve sometimes asked myself why I keep categories enabled.