Splitting an inbox into tabs is not new, but most of the companies that have offered it read the contents of a message to classify it. Proton Mail says it does the same while your mailbox stays under encryption it does not itself hold the key to.
The six groups
- Primary: personal, work, and important updates.
- Social: notifications from social platforms.
- Promotions: discounts and offers.
- Newsletters: what you subscribed to that is not promotional.
- Transactions: bookings, invoices and orders.
- Updates: automated confirmations and system alerts.
What you control
- Turning the tabs on or off entirely.
- Hiding a particular group from view.
- Moving a message from one group to another by hand.
- Setting notifications and unread counts from settings, under messages and composing.
Who gets it
It is on by default for new accounts, and existing accounts see a prompt before it is switched on. It is available in the web app and the phone apps.
The line worth reading twice
The company describes the feature as optional, and it can be turned off completely. That is not a formality: automatic tabbing changes what you see first in your mailbox, and an important message can land in a group you do not open every day. Anyone whose work runs on email should check the “transactions” and “updates” groups in the first few days before trusting the sorting.
Photo: a laptop open on an email inbox. By Banjo Brown, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
Source: the official Proton blog, post of 20 August 2026.
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