How to Disable Mail Categories on Mac

Apple has brought the controversial Mail Categories feature to the Mail app on Mac, and you will find that it is enabled in the Mail app by default. The idea behind Mail Categories is that your inbox is now sorting itself automatically into four categories; Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. There’s also a hidden “All Mail” category that is where you’ll actually find all of your emails, including emails you likely want to see that are not found in one of the pre-sorted Categories. This feature was first introduced on iPhone and was not necessarily received well by everyone, and now this feature is on the Mac and iPad.

If you wish to turn off the Mail Categories feature on Mac Mail app, read along and you’ll quickly find out how to do that, returning your Mail app to the standard inbox experience that you have been accustomed to for the entire duration of your Mac usage.

Where is the Mail Categories settings toggle?

If you want to turn off Mail Categories on the Mac, you might think you would find such a setting in the Mail app preferences or settings, which would be a logical place to look for a toggle for such a feature. But no, instead the ability to disable Mail Categories on the Mac is tucked into a nearly hidden contextual menu that you’re likely to overlook or not even notice, making it more difficult to turn off Mail inbox categorization than you’d expect.

How to Turn Off Mail Categories on Mac

Since there’s no toggle for Mail Categories in Mail Settings, where do you turn it off and on? We’ll show you, and it’s likely not where you’d think:

1. Open the Mail app on Mac and go to the main inbox screen
2. If this is the first time you’ve opened Mail app since the Mail Categories feature was introduced, you’ll see a settings toggle to disable it right away at the top of the inbox, click “Turn Off” to do that



3. Alternatively, select “All Inboxes” from the Mail sidebar, then look for the tiny (…) three dots menu above the inbox to access a hidden contextual menu, and uncheck “Mail Categories” from the dropdown menu

By disabling the Mail Categories toggle, your email inbox will be back to normal with your typical emails showing where you’d expect them to be.

Mail Categories is a Mess

In the screenshots used in this article, you’ll see one of the reasons why Mail Categories is simply not useful or appreciated by some users, myself included. In this case, the “Primary” Mail Categories inbox is showing months old DoorDash promotions and a series of random unopened newsletters from months ago, things you might expect to find in the “Promotions” or “Updates” inboxes, and certainly not prioritized. Why are months old DoorDash promotional emails and months old newsletters in the Primary inbox? Who knows, but this is simply not useful to me nor do I want to miss actually useful emails by relying on Apple’s Mail Categories sorting.

Meanwhile, emails that are recent, from actual people, things I do need and that are urgent, are often lost under the dark-pattern UX mostly hidden “All Mail” section (you have to sideways scroll in the inbox categories to find this, despite there being no indicator that you can do such a thing, great), and with no particular categorization.

I don’t know who this feature is built for or what kind of emails they get and need, but is this intelligent optimization of my email inbox? I personally don’t think so, certainly not for my email inboxes.

This auto-sorting Mail categories inbox feature was equally as annoying and useless on my iPhone, so I immediately disable this feature on every device that I can (here’s how you can turn off Mail Categories on iPhone and on iPad Mail too). For a little history, a similarly obnoxious email inbox sorting feature was introduced by Google to Gmail over a decade ago which is also something worth disabling if you haven’t done that yet, though Gmail’s inbox sorting is a lot better than Apple’s overall.

While this article shows you how to disable Mail Categories on Mail for Mac, if you like the way that Mail Categories adjusts your inbox for you, you might want to keep the feature enabled, and you’ll appreciate this feature being enabled already for you. You can also access the tiny (…) menu and select “Mail Categories” again to enable the feature manually if you had already turned it off.

What do you think of the Mail Categories feature on Mail for Mac, iPhone, and iPad? Do you like this feature and how it sorts your inboxes and emails for you? Do you find it to be useful, or do you find it to be inaccurate and frustrating? Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments.