https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/22/ios-182-upgrades-apple-mail-with-its-biggest-redesign-ever/
Please read more at the above link
Aesthetically, Apple is now emphasizing contact photos for senders as part of your inbox. Where you used to just see a bunch of text, now there’s color and imagery to go with it. Basically, emails in your inbox look a lot like threads in the Messages app, with a contact photo on the left.
This change ties in with Apple’s new Branded Mail tools for businesses. A business can now upload their logo to have it used as the contact photo not only in Mail, but also the Phone app, and in the Apple Pay interface when making contactless payments. But if a business hasn’t done that yet, place icons from Apple Maps get applied here instead.
Categories bring major changes to how your inbox works
More significant than the addition of contact photos, iOS 18.2 also brings a fundamental change to how your inbox works.
Apple Mail now automatically divides your inbox into four categories. Here are their titles and descriptions.
- Primary: Find the messages that matter most in Primary and organize everything else.
- Transactions: Keep track of your orders, including shipping and delivery notices, bundled by sender.
- Updates: Stay updated with a place for everything, including newsletters and alerts.
- Promotions: See what’s new from businesses and organizations you recognize.
Emails are automatically sorted as they’re received, and each category is subdivided into two sections: ‘New Messages’ and ‘Older Messages.’
In a nice touch, you can optionally set Mail’s notification badge count to only reflect the number of new messages in your Primary category, or opt to keep it the same as before, with all messages counted.