Categories
Color-coded groupings that cut across inboxes. How they show up and what hiding one does.
Categories are the colored buckets your mail sorts into. They cut across inboxes. One category like "Receipts" can hold mail from a hundred different inboxes. The category color is what you actually scan for in the email list, more than the words.
The color is the point
The visual signal you'll learn to read is the colored bar on the left edge of every email row. After a few days you'll recognize the color as fast as you'd recognize a logo. You glance, and you know what kind of mail it is before reading the subject.
Creating and editing
Settings → Categories. New ones get a name, a color, and an optional description. The description is a sentence about what the category is for. You can read it later in the same screen, and AI assistants connected to your Jade account use it to pick the right category when they sort your mail.
You can change a category's display name, color, description, or hidden flag any time. Renaming or recoloring a category is safe. Existing rules and already-tagged mail keep pointing at the same category.
What "hidden" does
A category can be hidden without being deleted. Hidden means:
- It's filtered out of the Everything view.
- It's omitted from the sidebar and new category-filter choices.
- Rules can still tag mail with it.
This is the lever for "I want Marketing tagged so the auto-unsubscribe rule can find it, but I don't want it cluttering Everything." Hide the category and the Everything view and navigation skip it; manage it later from Settings → Categories.
What deleting does
Deleting a category removes only the category itself. That covers the colored entry, the description, and the sidebar link. Existing emails tagged with that category keep the category they were tagged with; they just lose the color and the sidebar nav item. Rules that point at the deleted category keep firing and keep applying it to new mail; that mail is reachable in Everything but no longer via the sidebar.
If you want the mail moved to a different category, update the rules that assign it, then reprocess the mail (select it in the category's view and use Reprocess) before deleting.
The Everything view in the sidebar isn't a category. It's the unhidden union
of every category. You can't create or delete it. The name everything is
rejected when creating a category (case- and whitespace-insensitive).
How categories meet rules
Rules can set a category as one of their actions. A rule that says "if the subject contains verification code, tag it Priority" is setting the email's category to "Priority." The Rules and rule sets guide covers conditions, actions, and ordering.