How to Turn Off Mail Categories on iPad

The Mail app for iPad has been updated to include the Mail Categories feature with iPadOS 18.4. The Mail Categories feature is intended to automatically sort your email inbox within the Mail app into particular email categories, including “Primary”, “Transactions”, “Updates”, and “Promotions”, along with a mostly hidden “All Mail” option.

While the intention may be to clean up and sort the email inbox for users, in practice many users find that the Mail Categories are prioritizing ancient useless emails (like months old DoorDash promotions) and hiding useful recent emails from real people (like emails from family, friends, colleagues). Additionally, the Mail Categories feature places additional layers of interaction between your email inbox within Mail app and being able to actually see all of your emails. For these reasons, amongst others, some users may wish to disable the Mail Categories feature on iPad (You can also disable Mail Categories on Mac Mail app and turn off the feature on iPhone Mail too).

If you want to return the Mail app on iPad back to it’s easy classic interface and disable the Mail Categories feature, we’ll walk you through how to do it, because the setting for this is not in the Settings app.

How to Disable Mail Categories on iPad with iPadOS 18.4 and Newer

Here’s how to turn off the Mail Categories sorting feature on the latest iPadOS:

1. Open the Mail app on iPad
2. From the primary Mail screen, tap on the new (…) button in the upper right corner of the inbox
3. Select “List View” from the contextual popup menu
4. The Mail inbox on iPad will revert back to the classic Mail look and functionality, with no sorting categories

With Mail Categories disabled you’ll now see all of your emails in a single inbox again, making sure you won’t lose track of important emails and find useless emails prioritized instead, as myself and many other users have discovered their Mail inbox to behave with the new Mail Categories feature.

If you disabled this feature on iPad, you’ll probably also want to do that on your iPhone Mail app and Mac Mail app too.

Do you like the new Mail Categories feature on iPad, Mac, and iPhone? Do you find the automatic mail sorting to be done in a useful way to you, or do you find emails to be inappropriately prioritized and placed into areas where they make little sense? Did you disable this feature, or do you like it and plan on keeping it enabled? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.