Apple Mail with categories: Redesign comes to Germany as a beta
Apple's new e-mail app is designed to automatically clean up the inbox, which can now be tested in German. Companies can add branding to their emails.
(Image: Sebastian Trepesch)
Interested users can now test the major new features of iOS 18.4 & Co: Apple released a first public beta version of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4 and macOS 15.4 Sequoia for download on Tuesday night. These updates include Apple Intelligence, which works in these operating system versions for the first time, including in German. In addition, the AI system is now generally available in the EU. The other major innovation is the redesign of Apple Mail, which the manufacturer is also bringing to Germany and, for the first time, to all three device categories.
New Apple Mail sorted by category
The central innovation is the categories into which emails are automatically sorted. These include "Transactions", "News" and "Advertising". The inbox should now only show "important" messages and thus provide a quicker overview. However, emails classified as time-critical from the other categories will also appear under "Important". Since iOS 18.2, it has already been possible to use the new Apple Mail on the iPhone if the operating system or app is set to English, but sorting emails in languages other than English works poorly or not at all.
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The new betas also mark the start of the test run for extended language support, including German. The emails incorrectly sorted by the Apple automatic system can be manually assigned to a different category by the user.
In the first beta of iOS 18.4, Apple Mail sometimes had problems distinguishing correctly between "news" and "advertising", as reported by testers. Subscribed newsletters can therefore be found in "Advertising" –, a mistake that Gmail still likes to make, even though it has had such categories for many years.
Apple Intelligence contributes the email summaries to the new Mail app and is intended to prioritize important emails.
"Branded mails" with company logos
The categories are active by default and are likely to put off some users who are used to the user interface of Apple Mail, which has remained largely constant over the years. At least Apple seems to be aware of this: not only is there a separate category that simply shows "All emails", but it is also possible to switch back to the old, familiar list display at any time.
Within the categories, Apple Mail can choose to bundle all emails from a sender. Icons will also play a more prominent role: in future, the contact photos of individual senders will be joined by even more company logos. Apple retrieves the logos for such "branded mails" from its own servers. This is supposed to work in a data protection-friendly way by using the cryptographic technology "Private Information Retrieval" in conjunction with homomorphic encryption – This means that Apple does not know which company logos are being retrieved. The technology apparently replaces the previous system, which was based on BIMI.
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