That menu has never been active here. I don’t know what it takes to be able to select that option. Perhaps it doesn’t work for those of us who use the “classic” layout.
It will be interesting to find out—from stock analysts or journalists covering Apple, not press releases or influencers—if Mail Categories are only unpopular with certain groups of users or if it becomes a popular function.
In any case, it’s not an innovative feature; it replicates something Gmail has offered for years.
True, and FWIW, I turned it off soon after Google introduced it.
More precisely, I configured it so there are only three categories: unread, starred and everything else. Which covers my needs very well. The content I consider important is at the top and everything else is below that.
But I also don’t keep a lot in my inbox. Most messages get deleted soon after I read them (or in the case of shipping notes and such, after I’ve received the corresponding item). The few messages that I want to keep for a long time, I move to a custom folder.
In the distant past, when I was on a lot of e-mail lists, I created custom rules to move messages to folders based on the lists that sent the messages. Usually based on headers other than “To:” or “From:”, but ones that can more conclusively identify the list. Which, of course, requires the ability to filter on arbitrary headers, because different list servers use different list-identifying headers.
7 posts were split to a new topic: Spam filtering on the Mac
Yes, but not when the web page is loaded in Windows (where I send most of my time) as per my later post:
Update.
Apparently no one tested this 'improvement" under Windows and it can’t be reversed.
Time to sell the MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone and watch and find a home elsewhere for 600,000 emails.
I’ve had to turn it off on so many folks devices…
Email in general is so broken it’s become a burden to wade through. These measures are designed to help I realise but folks just don’t need another way to mislay things.
I quite like the column view in Reminders, a poor folks kanban. The phone is too small for it but the iPad works well.
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I left it on for several days. Nothing was ever classified into the categories. I use SpamSieve for junk mail filtering, maybe that had something to do with it? In any case, I was just testing to see how it would work. It didn’t. Even if it did I’m sure I would have eventually turned it off, given what I’ve read elsewhere and here.
In the distant past, when I was on a lot of e-mail lists, I created custom rules to move messages to folders based on the lists that sent the messages. Usually based on headers other than “To:” or “From:”, but ones that can more conclusively identify the list. Which, of course, requires the ability to filter on arbitrary headers, because different list servers use different list-identifying headers
There are official headers for mailing lists. list-id: is usually the best for filtering a list to its own folder, assuming that the list is legit and has the header. Mail.app at least through Catalina lets you add any list header. gmail server filtering is simply incompetent which can make it impossible to keep things out of spam or peculiar labels regardless of which client you use, such as all mail from a secretary’s supervisor… gmail education support never did find a solution so we moved him (and other staff) to outlook.
That document, although standards track since 1998, doesn’t seem to have much actual support. In my experience, I’ve always had to read the headers in order to determine what that particular server’s software wants to use for a list ID.
The ability to configure a mail client to be able to filter on any arbitrary header is critical, since there is far too much variation, despite the presence of a standards-track RFC.
3 posts were split to a new topic: How to turn off notification summaries on the Mac
8 posts were split to a new topic: Dealing with Apple UI changes