How to Use All Inboxes in Apple Mail on Mac

Running three or four email accounts in Apple Mail is common — a personal Gmail address, a work domain on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a side-project inbox on iCloud or Fastmail. The default setup shows each as a separate entry in the sidebar, so checking what has arrived means clicking through accounts one by one. Apple Mail has a combined view that removes that friction: All Inboxes. It aggregates every connected account in one mailbox, updates in real time, and is already present in every macOS installation that has more than one account connected.

What most users do not notice is that All Inboxes is configurable. You can exclude individual accounts from it, control which account sits at the top of the combined list, and pin All Inboxes to the Favourites bar for one-click access without touching the sidebar. This post covers how to use all inboxes in Apple Mail on Mac, how to exclude an account, what happens on iPhone and iPad, and what to check when the combined view stops showing an account it should.

The short answer#

Apple Mail does have a unified inbox. It is called All Inboxes and it appears automatically in the Mailboxes sidebar as soon as you add a second account. Every connected account is included by default. Clicking All Inboxes shows all arriving mail sorted by date across every account, and a label or coloured indicator next to the sender tells you which address the message landed in — so you can scan the combined view without losing track of which account a reply will come from.

To exclude a specific account — say, a newsletter-only address you check on its own schedule — go to Mail > Settings > Accounts (Mail > Preferences > Accounts on macOS Monterey and earlier), select the account, and uncheck Include in All Inboxes. The account stays connected and its own inbox remains accessible in the sidebar. It simply stops contributing to the aggregated view.

To control what you see first, drag account entries up or down in the sidebar Inboxes section. The sidebar order is reflected in the combined view when messages carry the same timestamp. And if you want All Inboxes reachable as a persistent tab, drag it up into the Favourites bar — the row of shortcut tabs that sits above the message list.

Before you start#

All Inboxes requires at least two accounts to be connected in Apple Mail. If only one account is set up, the All Inboxes entry does not appear in the sidebar — you are looking at that single account's inbox directly. To add a second account, go to Mail > Add Account and follow the authentication flow for your provider.

The instructions below apply to macOS Sonoma (14) and macOS Sequoia (15). On macOS Ventura (13) and earlier the menu path is Mail > Preferences instead of Mail > Settings, but the Accounts pane and the Include in All Inboxes checkbox are in the same location in both versions.

If the sidebar is not visible when you open Mail, press Shift + Command + M or go to View > Show Mailbox List to bring it back. Step paths may differ on future macOS versions — when in doubt, check the Apple Support Mail User Guide for Mac.

How to use All Inboxes in Apple Mail on Mac#

There are four things worth knowing how to do with All Inboxes: opening it, excluding an account, changing account order, and pinning it to the Favourites bar. The steps below cover each in sequence.

1. 1

   Open the Mailboxes sidebar and find All Inboxes

   Press Shift + Command + M or go to View > Show Mailbox List to make the sidebar visible. Under the Inboxes section you should see an All Inboxes entry with an unread-count badge. If the entry is missing, only one account is connected — add a second and it will appear automatically.

2. 2

   Click All Inboxes to open the combined view

   Click All Inboxes. Apple Mail shows every incoming message from every included account sorted by date, newest first. Each message shows a label or coloured dot indicating which account it arrived in. The unread badge on All Inboxes is the running total across all included accounts.

3. 3

   Exclude an account from All Inboxes

   Go to Mail > Settings > Accounts. Select the account you want to remove from the combined view. Find the checkbox labelled Include in All Inboxes and uncheck it. The change applies immediately — no restart needed. That account's individual inbox entry stays in the sidebar and remains fully accessible; it just no longer feeds into All Inboxes.

4. 4

   Change the account order in the sidebar

   Click and hold an account entry under the Inboxes section of the sidebar, then drag it to a new position within that group. The sidebar order is what Apple Mail uses to sequence accounts in the combined view. Placing your most-used account at the top means its messages appear first when timestamps are equal. If drag-and-drop does not stick, the account order may also be adjustable in System Settings > Internet Accounts on macOS Ventura and later.

5. 5

   Pin All Inboxes to the Favourites bar

   If the Favourites bar — the row of shortcut tabs above the message list — is not visible, enable it with View > Show Favourites Bar. Then drag the All Inboxes entry from the sidebar up into that bar. It becomes a one-click tab that stays visible regardless of what the sidebar is showing. Drag it back out to remove it from the bar.

6. 6

   Set the default sending account

   New messages composed from within All Inboxes use the default account from Mail > Settings > Composing > Send New Messages From. Change the dropdown to the address you write from most often. For replies, Mail always defaults to the account the original message arrived in — that applies automatically regardless of this setting, but you can switch the From address using the dropdown in the compose window before you send.

How All Inboxes behaves across Mac, iPhone, and iPad#

All Inboxes exists on iPhone and iPad as well, but the controls for excluding accounts and reordering sit in different places. The macOS Favourites bar has no direct equivalent on iOS — on iPhone and iPad you pin mailboxes in the Mailboxes list using the Edit button instead.

What to do when All Inboxes is not showing an account#

The most common cause is that Include in All Inboxes was unchecked for that account — either at setup or at some point later. Open Mail > Settings > Accounts, select the missing account, and check whether the checkbox is off. Re-enabling it is the fix in most cases, and the change takes effect immediately.

If the checkbox is already on, check the account's connection status. When an account loses its authentication — an OAuth token expires, a password changes, or the provider triggers a security event — Apple Mail may stop syncing without displaying a prominent error. Look for a cloud icon with a slash or an exclamation mark next to the account name in the sidebar. Click it to open the reconnection flow and re-authenticate against your provider.

A less obvious cause affects IMAP accounts from providers that use a non-standard inbox folder path. Apple Mail identifies the inbox by folder name, and if the server uses something other than the path Mail expects, that account does not contribute to All Inboxes even though it appears connected and syncing. The fix is in Mail > Settings > Accounts > Mailbox Behaviors for that account — verify the Inbox folder is pointing to the correct path on the server.

One final edge case: if an account was added using only outbound SMTP credentials without configuring an incoming server, it has no inbox for Mail to read. Accounts set up for send-only need an IMAP incoming server entry before they can appear in All Inboxes.

A faster way to manage a multi-account inbox#

Apple Mail's All Inboxes is dependable for what it is: a date-sorted aggregate of every connected account. What it does not do is triage the stream. Every message from every account arrives in the same unsorted list, and deciding what needs a reply today versus what can wait is still a manual pass through the whole view. If you run three or more accounts and find yourself doing that scan multiple times a day, the constraint is not the combined view — it is the absence of a prioritisation layer on top of it.

AI Emaily is an AI-native email client that connects Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, and generic IMAP accounts into one unified inbox and applies an agent that categorises and prioritises what arrives. You set the rules for what matters; the agent surfaces threads that need attention, prepares draft replies for your approval, and handles routine triage in the background. Autonomy runs from Manual (suggestions only) through Copilot (drafts ready, you approve each one) to Autopilot for defined low-stakes categories. There is a 7-day free trial on Pro and Autopilot plans. We build AI Emaily.