Apple’s Mail and Messages apps both offer a variety of Apple Intelligence features, and there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two, even if the implementation is a bit different. (Live Translation in Messages is covered separately.)
Use Smart Reply
Mail and Messages both offer smart replies, which are brief suggestions of what you might want to say that you can click or tap to save a few keystrokes or taps. Apple Intelligence looks for anything in the text of the message you’re replying to that could lead to a simple reply.
Mail offers a suggestion, if it has one, when you click to begin composing your reply. On a Mac, a little menu pops up; on an iPhone or iPad, the suggestions appear on the QuickType bar. Click or tap one of the words or phrases, and Mail expands it into a complete suggested response, which you can then accept as is or edit to taste. (Based on what we’ve seen, you will almost certainly want to edit it to sound more like you.)
Click Done to accept the response, or Revert to restore whatever you had originally. If you like the prewritten response, you can tell Apple by clicking or tapping the thumbs up button; if not, you can click or tap the thumbs down button and fill out a form explaining what was wrong. On a Mac, these buttons appear only when you hover over the Smart Reply bar; on an iPhone or iPad, they appear automatically on the QuickType bar.
In Messages, Apple Intelligence looks for questions or comments that could potentially result in a common response. Yes/no questions fall into this category, as do questions reminding you of appointments, confirming upcoming meetings, and making simple requests. (We’re sure there are many others, but there’s no definitive list.)
As in Mail, when Apple Intelligence comes up with a likely response, it’s displayed in a little pop-up control that looks just like the ones used for autocorrect on a Mac or on the QuickType bar on an iPhone or iPad. To accept one of the suggestions, click it; to dismiss them, click the close button. (You can also simply ignore the prompts and type as you normally would.)
Matching your style?
According to Apple, if you use the Smart Reply feature in Mail or Messages, the suggested replies adopt your writing style, punctuation, and tone. We tried this several times, and all we can say is…it did not. One of us would be ashamed to send any of these “smart” replies, because he does not write like an AI robot, and anyone who knows him would instantly see that something is off. (If you do write like an AI robot, maybe you’ll have better luck with this than we did.)
We urge you to double-check all Smart Replies before sending a message. We’ve seen cases in which the suggested text was incorrect or misleading, regardless of the style.
If you find Smart Replies to be not-so-smart or just plain annoying, you can disable them altogether, but Apple doesn’t make it easy. On a Mac, you can find the control in System Settings > Keyboard. Click Edit next to Input Sources and then turn off “Show suggested replies.” On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Siri > App Access > Mail, then turn off Show in App; do the same thing for Messages. (In other words, as Douglas Adams might have put it, it’s on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard.”)
Take action in other apps with suggestions
Suggestions may appear when Mail or Messages notices something in a conversation that you may want to take action on, such as adding a calendar event or searching for a photo.
Use improved search in Mail
Apple says that Mail in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 has improved, offering more relevant search results. When you type in the Search field, a banner appears telling you that Mail looks for meaning beyond the specific words you enter, presumably using Apple Intelligence.
In our tests, we were unable to get any expansive searches to pull up results that didn’t include words in the search phrase. Perhaps the improvements will become more evident later.
See Priority Messages in Mail
Apple Intelligence attempts to identify especially important messages and bubbles them up to the top of your Mail inbox. Apple says this applies to “time-sensitive messages” such as invitations and flight check-in reminders.
In our testing, this feature hasn’t been terribly helpful. It has identified messages that weren’t in any sense urgent while ignoring some that were. Unfortunately, it’s a black box; you can neither see nor influence what factors Apple Intelligence takes into account when assigning a message “Priority” status.
You can, however, turn off this feature: on a Mac, choose View > Show Priority Messages to uncheck it, or do the same using the More menu on the toolbar; on an iPhone or iPad, tap More > Show Priority. Note, however, that if Mail Categories is enabled (that is, Show Categories is selected on the same menu), the Show Priority Messages command is available only when the Primary category is selected.
This AI “priority” feature has nothing to do with the optional Low/Normal/High priority you can assign a message using the Message > Set Priority submenu.
Summarize Mail messages and threads
At the top of each message or thread is the word Summarize, with an icon to its left. Click or tap that, wait a few seconds, and a summary of the message appears. The accuracy of the summaries varies greatly, so don’t assume they are correct or contain everything of importance from the message.
If you click or tap the little pop-up menu button (Mac) or the More button (iPhone or iPad) in the preview, you can choose either Looks Good (to tell Apple the results were useful) or Something Isn’t Right. With the latter choice, a form appears in which you can fill in details about how the summary didn’t meet your needs and send the information to Apple to help them improve summaries in the future.
There’s also a second, simpler type of summary, which appears in the message preview (the little snippet of the message you see beneath the subject in the message list), right after a Summary icon. This is an attempt to briefly explain what the message is about, without summarizing the entire thing.
Although preview summaries are enabled by default, you can turn them off if you like. On a Mac, go to Mail > Settings > Viewing and uncheck Summarize Message Previews. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Apps > Mail and turn off Summarize Message Previews.
