How to Disable AI in IPhone Mail App
The Mail app on iPhone is not protected by Apple Intelligence. In fact, new AI features are enabled automatically once you update to the appropriate version of iOS and enable Apple Intelligence . Bam, your mail is now sorted into different boxes. Apple uses its artificial intelligence capabilities to automatically classify emails into different segments, separating your transactions, updates, and promotional emails from your primary contacts. They can’t be customized, but you can at least change the category of an email that is clearly in the wrong tab.
Apple Intelligence’s Summary feature is also in the foreground. Apple will try to summarize the email or chain of letters into one line right below the subject.
If you find these features annoying or useless, you can easily disable them. If you like to see all your email in one list, as you have for over a decade, there’s an easy way to go back. And if you feel like email summaries are a distraction, you can quickly get rid of them too.
The Apple Intelligence category features are part of the iOS 18.2 update , which is currently available as a developer beta and will soon be released as a relatively more stable public beta. You probably won’t have to worry about them right now, at least if you update them only after the features reach the final stage. But if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, you may already be seeing Mail Summary since it was released in iOS 18.1. Also in iOS 18.1 was Priority Messages, where Apple tries to place the emails it deems most important at the top of your inbox.
How to disable AI categories in the iPhone Mail app
There is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Let’s say you like the new Categories view most of the time, but from time to time you might want to view all your email as a single list. In this case, a simple right-click swipe on the Categories tab bar will open the hidden All Mail tab, where you can read all your emails in peace.
If you want to turn this feature off completely, tap the three-dot menu button at the top of the app and switch to list view . While you’re here, you can also turn off the Show Priority option to hide your Apple Intelligence Priority inbox.
How to Change Email Category in iPhone Mail App
You might want to keep your Categories tabs, but every now and then you find that the AI isn’t sorting your email quite right. In this case, you can manually reclassify the email – new emails from the same sender will even appear in the tab you moved it to.
Open the email and click the Reply button on the bottom toolbar. Swipe up and select Categorize . Now select the category you want to switch to. On the next screen, confirm your selection using the Continue option. Now all new emails from that sender will appear in the newly selected tab.
How to disable AI summary preview in Mail app
These little Apple Intelligence summaries are perhaps the least harmful of all the AI features. Whether you have a long message or email about a banking transaction or a shipping update, Apple will use artificial intelligence to show you the most important information right from your Inbox.
Go to Settings > Apps > Mail and turn off the Summarize Message Previews feature. Now, when you return to the Mail app, the small previews will disappear.
This setting does not disable the summary button that you will see in the top toolbar when you read an email. I’ve found this can be quite useful when viewing a long email, and it’s fairly unobtrusive – you have to click a button before you see the summary. The only way to disable this is to turn off Apple Intelligence completely, which you can do in Settings > Apple Intelligence and Siri > Apple Intelligence .