If you love chatting and messaging people using your phone but are less enthusiastic about junk calls and spam, iOS 26 should appeal. Unwanted calls? Apple Intelligence will screen them, asking callers to state their name and reason for contacting you – and you’ll then get a handy transcription to help you decide whether to pick up. Random texts from strangers? They’re herded into digital purgatory, ready for you to approve, ignore, or vaporize. No more irritating pings from some random guy who swears they met you at a conference in 2015.
It’s a win for user control. You decide who gets through and who is visible. Everyone else vanishes into the ether. Except, inexplicably, that’s not the case when it comes to email.
The Mail app has been welded to the iPhone since day one, but it feels like it’s been left behind. Sure, Apple touts its AI-powered categories – Primary, Transactions, Updates, Promotions – designed to bring order to inbox chaos. And spam tools are supposed to keep the worst junk at bay. The tiny snag? None of that works well.
Today alone, my Updates list (supposedly for news, subscriptions, and social media) includes a critical update from a shared Google Doc, a bank alert, and an airline check-in reminder. Promotions? That contains a PR pitch I needed, a message from my local council, and – why not – another Google Doc note from the same colleague, presumably to keep things interesting.
Screening in the Messages and Phone apps.
This feels less like Apple Intelligence and more like Apple Mail Roulette. You can manually recategorize senders, but who has time for that? And if you turn off categories, Mail passive-aggressively dumps everything back into a single list, as if to say, “Fine. You deal with it.” To top it all, spam email filtering on iPhone is, for reasons best known to Apple, significantly less effective than it is on the Mac.
Mail is coming at this all wrong. It tries to be clever but ends up overcomplicating things with automation that results in busywork. I’d prefer it copy the simplicity of Messages and Phone, acting as a barrier to unknown senders. Give us inboxes that only approved contacts can reach. Banish unknown senders to a folder we can check when we have the time. And actual spam? That should never go beyond the junk folder where it belongs, rather than too often leaking into other mailboxes.
What’s wild is that I was emailing people long before I had a cell phone and sent my first text. Yet in 2025, Apple Mail is lagging behind Phone and Messages in helping you control who can contact you. It’s not like this can’t be done in email either. Witness Hey’s feature called The Screener, which requires first-time emailers to be approved before their missives enter your inbox. No algorithmic guesswork. A simple yes or no.
Messages and Phone have now shown how easy it is to control who can reach you. Mail should take the hint. Because right now, that app too often feels like it needs consigning to a junk folder alongside all those spam emails.