MacOS mail VIP not working

I finally fixed it. hope it helps. The entire 2025 with this bug Apple.

Go to the VIPs folder. Select Any VIP box. Go to View>Sort By>Select All MailBoxes.

Close Mail, Open mail again, Everything should be fine.

Why this works? Wakaran

I have found the same issue. If one restarts AppleMail, sometimes the VIP emails will reappear under the VIP section, but when going back to inbox and returning to the VIP section it defaults to the same as inbox again.

Ok folks, I can't be certain.... but I think I've worked out what the problem might be

I have a second device with Apple Mail on that only has three accounts on it and VIP is working there. I think there could be a limit to how much content the VIP filter can handle. I'm going to test by adding more mail accounts and see if I can break it :D

I'll report back with my results

You are right, I spoke too soon! It must have worked immediately after the reboot, but I just checked now (without rebooting again) and it is back to being broken 😞. To answer your question I have 4 accounts in Mail (Google and Apple).

Bummer. Well I was hoping...

To be clear I never removed ALL my VIPs/VIP mailbox and started over. Not sure if that makes a difference or if I just got lucky.

Hope Apple fixes this soon.

Having exactly the same problem, as are many people posting to Apple Community. Rebuilding mailboxes, rebooting, restarting mail doesn't work. There seems to be some glitch with VIP designation in Sequoia mail.

I'm not sure if this will help or if you've already tried it from your description. I was able to get my VIPs working by going to EACH VIP mailbox (e.g. John Smith), right-clicking on the name then removing the VIP status, then searching for the person (e.g. John Smith) in my All Inboxes mail box, clicking on their name/email address and remarking them as a VIP.

Unfortunately you can't do this en masse. So I had to do this for EACH VIP mailbox - which is tedious if you have a lot of them. But it does appear to work, and stick, so far. If you haven't found a solution yet I this helps.

Very surprised there aren't more people commenting on this issue! I updated to 15.3.2 and this function is still broken and has been for a while now

I have multiple email addresses (not sure if this might be relevant)

If I reboot the mail app then my VIP inboxes work for a short while, but if I switch to another mailbox or to a different VIP then all I can see is the mail from all of my inboxes

I have tried removing the VIP status and re-adding it, re-starting mail, re-starting the device, but always the same behavior. Very frustrating!

VIP works fine on my IOS devices

Can I just clarify, you're the same as me right? You have multiple mailboxes from different providers?

I'm wondering if the VIP functionality is a filter that has to scan the various mailboxes first and it gets stuck for lack of a better word with one of the providers, hence only showing the full inbox.

This is clearly an issue that isn't affecting very many people, so that makes me think there is something unique about what we are doing that is causing this

Restarting Apple mail the VIP filter works for a short while then the filters seem to fail and it brings in random emails. Unable to identify why the email are added as they seem to be random. All VIP emails show the same email in their respective inboxes.

I'm curious, do you have a number of email addresses in your Apple Mail? I currently have 8, a mix of Google, Apple and Microsoft. I was wondering if that has something to do with it