Return to inbox: this new iPhone Mail setting fixes one of the app’s most annoying quirks

One of the longest standing feature requests for Apple Mail on iPhone is for the app to change how it behaves when a user moves a message to a different folder, or sends it to the trash.

Until iOS 18.4, the Mail app would always automatically move on to the next message in the inbox, which would annoyingly cause that unrelated message to be marked as read in the process. What many users have asked for, is for the app to simply return to the inbox list instead. iOS 18.4 finally makes that possible.

Automatically moving on to another message after sending an email to the trash is a pretty unexpected behavior, as most other email apps do not work this way. In fact, this quirk of Mail has been the sole reason some iPhone owners have resorted to third-party apps, like Spark or Outlook.

But with Apple Mail getting better all the time, and especially with useful Apple Intelligence additions like summaries and smart replies, Mail is getting attention once again. And this tiny little change in iOS 18.4 may just be the catalyst for many users to come back to the Apple native app.

With iOS 18.4, there’s a new Mail setting called “Delete or Move Message Action”. The default action is “View Next Message”, which preserves the long-standing default behavior. But if you change to the new option of “Don’t Select a Message”, the Mail app will no longer navigate to another email and instead simply returns to the inbox list.

More specifically, after deleting an email, the app jumps back one screen to your list of emails. That allows the user to select another message of their choosing and continue to triage their inbox.

You can find this setting by opening the Setting app, and going to Apps -> Mail -> Message List -> Delete or Move Message Action.

This small-but-much-welcomed change is part of iOS 18.4, which is currently in developer beta and public beta testing stages. You can expect iOS 18.4 to be released as a free software update for all iPhone users sometime in April.

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