Weird Apple Mail Archiving Behavior Finally Fixed
If all you need is a simple and reliable email client, the Apple Mail app is a great choice. And it only gets better over the years. But until now it had one strange feature: users turned to third-party clients such as Gmail or Outlook.
This is due to how the Archive feature works. When you archive an email you’re reading, the Mail app automatically opens the next email in your inbox. This is great if you’re just looking at newsletters. But when this happens, the next email is automatically marked as read, which you might not want to do in every case (for example, if the sender uses a tracking service or if you saved the email to read later).
It’s a small thing, but it takes away your agency and makes it quite frustrating to deal with. Luckily, Apple seems to have finally realized this, and in iOS 18.4 , which is currently in developer beta , the company has provided a hidden settings option to change this behavior. Why Apple doesn’t just make the fix by default and why it has to be an obscure settings item is beyond me.
Either way, if you’re running iOS 18.4 and use the Mail app regularly, head over to the Settings app. Then go to the Mail section and select the Delete or Move Message Action. Here, switch to the “Don’t select message” option.
Boom. Everything is ready. Now, when you read a message in the Mail app and delete, archive, or move it, the app won’t automatically open the next message and instead you’ll be taken back to the Inbox view. What a revolution!
Speaking of the Inbox, if you have Apple Intelligence running on your device, you may have noticed that the Mail app now looks a little different. There are tons of categories at the top, AI summaries, and even priority emails that never manage to highlight the truly important messages. If you don’t like all or some of these AI features, I have good news – you can turn it all off. Follow this guide to disable all the new AI features in the iPhone Mail app and get back to the way things were before. Of course, except for the old archive. Because this time this change is actually useful.