Manage Mailboxes or Folders in Mail

Manage Mailboxes in Mail on the iPad

The Mail app on the iPad gives you more than just an inbox. It also gives you a simple way to organize email into mailboxes, which many people think of as folders. This is helpful when you want to keep certain types of email together, such as receipts, travel confirmations, tickets, or anything else you may want to find quickly later.

You can create your own mailboxes, move messages into them, and even mark your most-used ones as favorites so they are always easy to reach. You also have the choice of whether an email should be archived for later or moved to the trash if you no longer need it.

What Are Mailboxes

Mailboxes are the folders inside the Mail app. Some are there automatically, such as Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and Archive. Others can be created by you.

When you open Mail on the iPad, the sidebar shows a combination of your mail accounts and your mailboxes. For example, you may see All Inboxes, along with individual accounts like iCloud and Gmail. Below that, you may also see mailboxes such as Flagged, which gathers all flagged messages into one place.

Each account can have its own set of mailboxes. So if you use more than one email account, it helps to know that a mailbox belongs to a specific account. That becomes especially important when you create a new mailbox or move a message.

Create a Mailbox

Creating a mailbox is a good way to keep certain emails together instead of leaving everything in your inbox or archive. You might create one called Receipts, another for Tickets, or one for Travel.

To create a mailbox, open the Mail app and go to the sidebar where your mailboxes are listed. Tap Edit in the upper-left corner, then tap New Mailbox at the bottom.

Type the name you want to use for the mailbox. After that, choose the location for it. This means choosing which email account the mailbox should belong to, such as iCloud or Gmail. You can also place it inside another mailbox if you want to make it a subfolder.

Once you tap Save, the new mailbox appears in that account. After that, it is ready to use.

Remove a Mailbox

If you no longer need a mailbox, you can remove it.

Go back to the sidebar, tap Edit, and then tap the mailbox you want to change. From there, you can delete it. This same area also lets you rename the mailbox if needed.

This is useful if you created a mailbox for a short-term project, trip, or event and no longer need it once that activity is over.

Move a Mailbox

You can also move a mailbox to a different location.

After tapping Edit and selecting the mailbox, choose a new location for it. That can mean moving it into another folder or changing how it is organized inside the account.

This can help if you want to clean up your mailbox list or group similar folders together.

Move an Email into a Mailbox

Once you create mailboxes, the next step is putting email into them. The iPad gives you a couple of easy ways to do this.

One of the simplest methods is drag and drop. If the mailbox is visible in the sidebar, tap and hold the email, drag it over the mailbox, and release it when the mailbox becomes highlighted. The message moves right into that folder.

You can also move a message using the toolbar. Open the email you want to move, then look for the toolbar options. If all the tools are not visible, tap the double carets to show more. Choose Move, then select the mailbox where you want the email to go.

This method is especially helpful when the destination mailbox is in a different account. For example, if the email is currently in Gmail but the mailbox you want is in iCloud, you can move the message from one account to the other by selecting the correct account first and then choosing the mailbox inside it.

That is an important point: if you do not see the mailbox you want, it may be because you are looking in the wrong account.

Trash vs. Archive

This is one of the most useful things to understand in Mail because trash and archive do very different jobs.

When you move an email to Trash, you are telling Mail that you do not want to keep it. It is not always gone immediately, but it is on its way out. In the example from the video, trash works much like the trash at home. You can still get something back for a while, but once enough time passes, it is removed. In many cases, that happens after about 30 days.

So if you accidentally throw something away, you may still be able to open the Trash mailbox and move it back. But after that time period, it may be permanently deleted.

Archive works differently. Archiving keeps the email, but removes it from your inbox. Think of it like putting a paper into a filing cabinet. It is out of the way, but still there whenever you need it.

That is why archive is often the better choice for messages you may want later. You might not need them in front of you every day, but you also do not want to lose them. You can still search for archived email at any time.

A practical way to think about it is this: if you know you do not need the message, send it to Trash. If you may want it later, send it to Archive.

In the video, you also show a real-world way to use this. Messages like receipts, tickets, and travel confirmations go into specific mailboxes, while most other email simply goes into Archive. That keeps the inbox clean without losing important information.

Favorite Mailboxes

If there are mailboxes you use all the time, you do not have to keep opening each account to find them. You can add them to Favorites so they stay near the top of the sidebar.

To do this, tap Edit in the sidebar. Then tap Add Mailbox. This does not create a new mailbox. Instead, it adds an existing mailbox to your list of favorites.

From there, choose the account, select the mailbox you want, and tap Done. Once you finish, that mailbox appears in the Favorites area for quick access.

This is a great way to keep commonly used mailboxes close by. For example, you might favorite Drafts, Today, or a custom mailbox like Receipts. That way, you do not need to dig through your account folders every time you want to open them.

Wrap Up

Mailboxes make the Mail app on the iPad much more useful. Instead of leaving everything in one long inbox, you can organize messages into folders that match the way you think and work.

You can create your own mailboxes, remove or move them when needed, and file messages into them with drag and drop or the Move command. You can also choose between trashing email you do not need and archiving email you may want later. And by favoriting your most-used mailboxes, you can make them even easier to reach.

This is one of those features that can make Mail feel much less cluttered. Once you start using mailboxes for things like receipts, tickets, or travel, it becomes much easier to stay organized and find what you need later.