Give your emails the VIP treatment

Say goodbye to email interruptions with the power of Mail’s VIP list

You don’t need to know about every email the moment it arrives in your inbox. Most mail apps don’t distinguish between spam and messages that tell you a family member has uploaded a photo to your shared album in iCloud. However, with Mail on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you can ensure you’re only informed about messages from people that matter to you.

The trick is to add those people to your VIP list. That list is handled differently than other email, and as a result is easy to forget or even know about in the first place. It gets its own inbox, and you can get VIP–specific notifications. That means you can have Mail notify you silently for those everyday messages that don’t matter so much, but get the trumpets out for a message from your boss, partner or any other person that’s particularly important to you.

The VIP list carries across to Apple Watch too. By default, the Watch mirrors your Mail’s settings from your iPhone, so if you only enable alerts for VIP messages then that’s all you’ll get on your Watch. Creating a VIP list is easy. Here’s how to do it.