How to Sort Emails in Mac Mail by Sender, Size or Date (2026)

To sort emails in Mac Mail, open the mailbox, choose View > Sort By, then pick what to sort on, such as From, Size or Date, and a sort order. In column layout you can also Control-click a column header and choose Sort By (Apple's Mail User Guide). Sorting only changes the order of the list; nothing is moved or deleted.

A list sorted the wrong way is the quiet reason a lot of inboxes feel unmanageable. The one email you need is in there, just buried under hundreds of newer ones. This guide walks through each useful sort in Mail on macOS: by sender when you're gathering one person's mail, by size when an account is filling up, by date when you need the oldest first, plus column layout, how conversations and categories change what you see, and how to get the list back to normal.

How to sort emails in Mail on Mac

Mail sorts the message list from the View menu in the menu bar. Apple's sorting instructions come down to two choices in View > Sort By: the attribute and the order.

1. Open Mail and click the mailbox you want to sort in the sidebar, such as Inbox or a project mailbox.
2. Choose View > Sort By in the menu bar.
3. Click the attribute to sort on, for example From, Size or Date.
4. Open View > Sort By again and choose the sort order you want.

The submenu offers more than the three in this post's title. iDownloadBlog's walkthrough lists these attributes, and the table says what each one is good for:

Your version of macOS may show a few more entries, and menu wording can shift between releases, so go by what your own Sort By submenu lists.

How to sort Apple Mail by sender

To sort Mail by sender on a Mac, choose View > Sort By > From. Mail then lines the messages up by who sent them, so everything from one sender sits together instead of being spread across months of mail.

Before a quarterly review, I open the client's mailbox and sort by From. Every email from their finance lead ends up in one block, and I can scan what was promised without searching name by name. When I'm done, I switch back to Date so tomorrow's mail doesn't land somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.

When sorting by sender scatters a company's mail

One organization can write to you under several sender names, such as a billing address, a support address and a person's own name. Those can land in different places in a list sorted by From. For that job, search is the better tool: type from: followed by the name in the search field, a header search Apple's search guide describes, and Mail lists the matches together. The post on Apple Mail advanced search covers the other search tokens.

Turn off conversations for a strict sender sort

With View > Organize by Conversation turned on, Mail bundles replies from the same thread into one row (Apple's conversation guide). That's handy for reading, but a thread holds messages from several people, so a sender sort works on threads rather than single emails. For one row per email, choose View > Organize by Conversation again to remove the checkmark, sort, then turn it back on when you're finished.

How to sort emails by size in Mac Mail

To find your largest emails in Mail, choose View > Sort By > Size and set the order so the biggest messages come first. Apple suggests exactly this in its guide to freeing up storage: "To quickly identify large messages, choose View > Sort By > Size."

Once the heavy messages are at the top, you have three options from the same Apple guide:

• Delete the message if you don't need it, or move it to a mailbox on your Mac.
• Keep the message, drop the file. Select it and choose Message > Remove Attachments. The email stays, with a note that the attachment was removed.
• Empty the Trash afterward with Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items, because deleted mail stays on the server until you do.

Before I move an old project's mailbox off the server, I sort it by size and save the few big presentation files to a folder first. The rest of the mailbox is usually small text emails, and nobody misses those taking up a little space.

Big files don't always sit in the Inbox. If it looks small but the account is still full, try the same sort in Sent and Archive, where large files you sent yourself tend to pile up. Apple's page on keeping mailboxes from getting too big adds rules and extra mailboxes as longer-term fixes.

How to sort emails by date, oldest first

Mail usually lists messages by date with the newest on top. To read oldest first, choose View > Sort By > Date, then choose the opposite sort order in the same submenu. The mailbox's oldest message then sits first.

After a week away from a shared support inbox, I flip it to oldest first. Answering in the order people wrote means the person who has waited six days hears back before the one who wrote an hour ago, which is the fair way to dig out of a backlog.

When the job is one slice of time rather than the whole mailbox in reverse, a date search is faster. Type two dates with "to" between them, in the form 04/02/23 to 04/19/23 that Apple's search guide uses, and Mail shows messages from that period.

Newest or oldest first inside a conversation

The order of messages within a conversation is a separate setting from the list sort. Choose Mail > Settings, click Viewing, and select or deselect Show most recent message at the top (Apple). The setting decides how a thread reads in the preview, not where the thread sits in the list.

How to sort in column layout

Column layout turns Mail's message list into a table with a header row, so sorting works from the column headers. Turn it on with View > Use Column Layout, then Control-click any column header and choose Sort By with an attribute and order (Apple's column layout guide). Per iDownloadBlog, a plain click on a header also sorts by that column.

1. Choose View > Use Column Layout. A checkmark shows it's on.
2. Pick where the message preview goes: View > Show Side Preview or View > Show Bottom Preview.
3. Control-click a column header and choose an attribute to add or remove that column.
4. Drag a column header left or right to reorder the columns.
5. Control-click a header, choose Sort By, then choose an attribute and a sort order.

Apple notes that the Conversation, Status and Subject columns always show, and that Top Hits don't appear when you search in column layout. iDownloadBlog also mentions extra columns such as Date Received, Mailbox, Priority and VIP.

I use column layout for one thing: a Smart Mailbox that pulls mail from several accounts. Turning on the Mailbox column shows where each message lives, and sorting by To separates mail sent to my work address from mail sent to my personal one. For daily reading I switch back to the standard layout (choose View > Use Column Layout again to remove the checkmark), because it shows more of each preview.

Sorting, categories and filters: which one hides what

Sorting never hides a message; categories and filters do. Since macOS Sequoia 15.4, Mail can sort incoming mail into Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions where the feature is offered (Apple), and the message filter can show only unread mail or similar (Apple). If your sorted list looks too short, one of these is usually why.

Categories switch off from the toolbar: open View Options and deselect Show Mail Categories, an option the View menu also carries (Apple). A sender filed under the wrong heading can be moved: Control-click any email from them, open Categorize Sender, then select the category it belongs in. Apple says their current and future messages follow.

Sorting and the other tools work together. Categories or a filter decide which messages are showing, and Sort By orders whatever is left. I sometimes open Promotions and sort it by From to see which stores fill that tab, one block of offers per sender.

How to get Mail back to its normal order

To reset Mail's sort, choose View > Sort By > Date and pick the order with the newest message on top. That's the order most people expect, with each new email landing first in line.

One morning I was convinced a day's worth of email had gone missing. It hadn't: I'd sorted the inbox by Subject the evening before to find a thread, and new messages were slotting in alphabetically halfway down. Now, whenever the list looks wrong, my first check is the Sort By submenu, then the filter and categories.

If you switch mailboxes and one still shows an odd order, open it and set Sort By there too. And if messages seem truly missing rather than out of place, Apple's article on missing email covers rebuilding mailboxes and checking disabled accounts.

A few sorting habits worth keeping

• Sort, act, sort back. Use From or Size for a task, then return to Date so new mail stays visible.
• Search when one sender has many names. A from: search beats a sender sort for companies.
• Save files before Remove Attachments on any IMAP account.
• Check Sent and Archive when hunting for big emails, not only the Inbox.
• Turn off conversations when you need a strict one-email-per-row sort.
• Keep a Smart Mailbox for a sort you set up every week. Create one with Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox (Apple).

If you'd rather tidy the inbox than reorder it, the guide to archiving emails in Mac Mail covers moving finished mail out of the way, and color coding in Mac Mail shows how to make chosen senders stand out in any sort order.