How to Customize the Apple Mail Toolbar on Mac (2026 Guide)

To customize the Apple Mail toolbar on a Mac, Control-click one of the toolbar buttons, pick Customize Toolbar, then drag the buttons you want from the palette into the toolbar and drag the ones you don't want out of it. Click Done to save. You can also open the same palette from View → Customize Toolbar, as Apple's Mail guide and Mac Help describe.

The row of buttons across the top of Mail is the part of the app I click more than anything else, yet the default set was chosen for nobody in particular. Ten minutes spent on it pays back every day. This guide covers adding, removing and reordering buttons, showing text labels, bringing back a toolbar that vanished, resetting everything, and the separate toolbar in the window where you write an email. The steps are written for Mail on macOS 27; the Customize Toolbar command itself has been in Mail for many versions.

How to add buttons to the Apple Mail toolbar

Adding a button to the Apple Mail toolbar means dragging it from the Customize Toolbar palette into the toolbar until a green plus sign appears. Apple's toolbar instructions for Mac describe exactly this, and they apply to Mail like any other app.

1. Open Mail and click into the main Mail window (not a message you're writing).
2. Control-click (or right-click) a toolbar button, then pick Customize Toolbar. The menu route is View → Customize Toolbar.
3. A palette of available buttons opens just below the toolbar.
4. Drag a button from the palette up into the toolbar. Let go when you see the green plus sign.
5. Click Done.

If Control-clicking a button gives you that button's own menu instead, Control-click an empty stretch of the toolbar. Either spot opens the same Customize Toolbar command.

On every new Mac, I drag Archive in before touching anything else and drop it right beside Delete. Deleting and archiving are the two moves I make on almost every email, and having them side by side means my pointer barely travels. If you've never thought about which one to use, our guide to archiving in Mac Mail explains where archived email goes and how to find it again.

How to remove or rearrange toolbar buttons

To remove a button from the Apple Mail toolbar, hold Command and drag it off the toolbar until it disappears with a puff of smoke. To move a button, hold Command and drag it sideways to a new spot. Both shortcuts come from Apple's Mac Help and work without opening the Customize Toolbar palette at all.

1. Hold down the Command key.
2. Press on the toolbar button you want to change.
3. To remove it, drag it down and away from the toolbar, then let go. To move it, drag it left or right and drop it when a gap opens.

Inside the Customize Toolbar palette you don't need Command: every button can be dragged freely while the palette is open. The palette also offers Space and Flexible Space items. MacMost's walkthrough explains the difference well: a flexible space stretches to fill whatever room is left in the window, which is handy for pushing a group of buttons to the right edge.

I group my toolbar into three main clusters with a space between each: replying (Reply, Reply All, Forward), clearing (Archive, Delete, Junk) and marking (Flag). Splitting them stopped me from hitting Delete when I meant Reply, which happened more than once when the buttons were packed together. The full layout is at the end of this guide.

Which buttons can you put in the Mail toolbar?

The Mail toolbar can hold buttons for most of the everyday actions in the app: getting new email, writing, replying, archiving, deleting, flagging, filtering and more. Apple's Mail guide refers to several of them by name, including the Flag and Archive buttons, the Delete button, the New Message button and the Filter button. The exact palette depends on your version of macOS, so treat the table below as a guide to what each common button is good for, not a complete list.

Filter deserves a closer look because it's easy to switch on and forget. With the filter on, a mailbox shows only the email that matches it, so the inbox can look strangely short. If that happens, click the Filter button again. Searching is a different job: for operators and saved searches, see Apple Mail search operators and Smart Mailboxes.

The Flag button has a small menu of its own. Apple's page on marking emails to revisit says you click it and then pick a flag, and you remove one by clicking the button again and choosing Clear Flag. If you give each flag color a meaning, our post on color coding in Mac Mail shows how to rename them.

How to show text labels under toolbar buttons

To show a word under each icon in the Apple Mail toolbar, open View → Customize Toolbar, click the Show pop-up menu in the palette's lower corner, and choose Icon and Text. Apple's Mac Help says the Show menu exists for some toolbars, and MacMost confirms Mail's palette lists Icon and Text, Icon Only and Text Only. Your version of macOS may offer fewer of these.

Labels take up room, so the toolbar fits fewer buttons with them on. I turned them on for the first week after rearranging, until my hands knew where everything lived, then went back to icons only to win back the space.

Why toolbar buttons disappear (and how to get them back)

When an Apple Mail toolbar button seems to vanish, it's usually hiding behind a double chevron (>>) at the right end of the toolbar. macOS moves the buttons that don't fit into that menu when the window is too narrow. Widen the Mail window, or remove a button you rarely use, and the hidden ones come back.

I hit this on my laptop after adding Print: Flag slid off the end and I spent a minute assuming I'd deleted it. Taking Print back out fixed it. On a small screen, fewer buttons beats a full toolbar you can't see.

Other reasons a button is missing or grayed out:

• Nothing is selected. Reply, Archive, Flag and Move only work on a selected email, so they look dimmed until you click one.
• You're customizing the wrong window. The message you're writing has its own toolbar (below). Buttons added there don't appear in the main Mail window, and the reverse.
• The button is there but seems to do nothing. Archive is the usual suspect; our archiving guide explains where archived email ends up and how to find it.

How to hide or show the Mail toolbar

To hide or show the whole toolbar in Apple Mail, choose View → Hide Toolbar or View → Show Toolbar. Apple's list of Mac keyboard shortcuts gives Option-Command-T for showing or hiding a toolbar in an app; check Mail's View menu to see the shortcut printed beside the command on your Mac.

A stray key press is enough to hide the toolbar, so if yours is simply gone, the View menu is the first place to look. In full screen, some apps also offer View → Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen (per Mac Help); if Mail lists it, turn it on so the buttons don't slide away while you work.

How to reset the Apple Mail toolbar to the default

To restore Apple Mail's original toolbar, open View → Customize Toolbar, find the default set of buttons along the palette's lower edge, and drag that whole row up into the toolbar. Let go when the green plus sign appears, then click Done. MacMost and iDownloadBlog both describe this as the way to undo every change at once.

1. Choose View → Customize Toolbar.
2. Below the individual buttons, find the row labeled as the default set.
3. Drag the entire row up onto the toolbar and release on the green plus sign.
4. Click Done.

If the drop doesn't take, aim for the toolbar itself rather than the message list below it. Quitting and reopening Mail is the next thing to try.

How to customize the toolbar in the new message window

Apple Mail's compose window, where you write a new message, has its own toolbar, and you customize it the same way: open a new message, Control-click its toolbar, and choose Customize Toolbar. Apple's guides mention several of its buttons, including Attach, Format, Emoji & Symbols, and Header Fields (which adds the Bcc field).

1. In Mail, press Command-N or click the New Message button.
2. Control-click the toolbar of the new message window and choose Customize Toolbar (or choose View → Customize Toolbar while that window is in front).
3. Drag buttons in or out, then click Done.

The changes stick for every new message you write afterward. I keep Header Fields within easy reach because when I send one update to a group of people who don't know each other, I want the Bcc field showing before I type a single address. Format earns its place too if you ever paste text that arrives in the wrong font.

A toolbar layout that works for a busy inbox

A good Apple Mail toolbar holds only the buttons you click every day and leaves everything else to menus and shortcuts. Start from the actions you repeat most, keep destructive buttons apart from reply buttons, and stop adding once the window starts hiding buttons behind the chevron.

The layout I settled on, left to right:

1. Get Mail, then a space.
2. Reply, Reply All, Forward, then a space.
3. Archive, Delete, Junk, then a space.
4. Flag and Move.
5. A Flexible Space, then Filter and Search at the right.

New Message isn't on it, because Command-N is faster than finding the button. Print isn't either; I rarely print email, and File → Print covers the odd receipt. Your list will differ, and that's the point: the toolbar should mirror what you do, not what Apple guessed.