Before getting into the nuances of what the new Apple Intelligence inbox looks like, let’s set the scene of e-mail. It is estimated that 361.6 billion e-mails have been sent in 2024. Apple owns 53.67% of the market, which means over 194 billion e-mails were sent through Apple Mail this year. 

That’s a lot of e-mail.

How about e-mail/newsletters for news organisations? 

I asked Smartocto how much traffic comes from newsletters, and they estimate 1.75% from their clients. I further drilled into this with my colleague Greg Piechota, head of the INMA Readers First Initiative, who pointed to the Reuters Institute, which found that 5% adults said e-mail is their main gateway to access online news in 2024: 

Greg also told me that while these numbers resonate with what he sees in the INMA subscriptions benchmark, there is a big nuance: “Despite a low proportion of external traffic, e-mail audience is qualified, and that means it demonstrates higher brand preference and engagement than, for example, audience coming from search or social media.” 

In other words, we can agree newsletters are an important part of the distribution mix. Now let’s look at this from the consumer side — and specifically Apple Intelligence. 

As we know, e-mail can be all consuming and very few of us manage to get to “inbox zero.” Apple has created a feature that automatically places e-mail into four distinct categories: primary, transactions, updates, and promotions. 

See the screenshots below, each of which includes the explanation for each category:

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it’s helped me enormously. When I am using my mobile phone on the fly — which is a lot — I mainly look at the primary inbox. If I have some time to kill, I’ll go to updates, but that’s probably less than 10% of my time. But you’re not interested in my habits, a case study of one. I am using this purely for illustration. 

Let’s look at this from a news perspective, which means talking about newsletters. 

Newsletters in Mail are mostly relegated to the third inbox named “updates,” shown in purple above, although some go into promotions. I suspect this is based on call to actions, but that’s just a hunch. Being outside the primary inbox likely means less viewability, therefore less traffic, less habit, and less brand prominence.  

In other words, e-mails are no longer equal, and newsletters will lose prominence in the inbox. News organisations are likely to lose traffic from newsletters. We don’t yet know the take up. It was automatically applied to my e-mail inbox and I enjoyed it. Others may turn it off immediately. And regulations in some parts of the world such as Europe mean Apple Intelligence won’t be launching for some time.  

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

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