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How to attach an attachment as an icon and NOT within the body of an email in Mail?

Attachments appear within the body of an email by anyone receiving the email generated by Mail. That is NOT acceptable.


I want the attachment to appear as an attachment to the email, not within the body of an email received by the recipient.


Any ideas how to fix this?

Posted on Jul 17, 2022 11:59 AM

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Posted on Jul 17, 2022 12:49 PM

If all else fails you could try creating your attachment as .zip file. This is built into Finder by right click Compress.

10 replies

Jul 17, 2022 1:55 PM in response to Barney-15E

Yes I can control how a person receives an attachment. Just look at Outlook or Thunderbird as examples. HTML works flawlessly but Mail does not offer that option.

As Mal-S said above, the only way for this to work, is to compress the attachment and send it that way.

Then the receiver can chose to open the attachment or not, without being forced to see the attachment in the message body.

Jul 17, 2022 2:24 PM in response to GeoP1

If you send an email as an attachment, it goes as an attachment. A compressed file is merely a file; there's nothing special about it other than the fact that is it compressed ... made smaller in size. and possible a "cabinet" like file But being compressed, it may now fall into that size range that allows it to be an attachment. There are size limits to attachments, but not so much to text.


Attachments I send to all my contacts arrive as attachments, but I make sure the size does not exceed the max limit. And that's been the case for decades.

Jul 17, 2022 6:55 PM in response to Barney-15E

FWIW:

DISCLAIMER: I have not tried these commands on current versions of Mail running on macOS.

Proceed at your own risk.


Circa 2013, terminal commands could be used to tell Apple Mail running on then-current versions of OS X how YOU wanted Mail to display attachments ON YOUR DEVICE.


The command to disable in-line attachments (attachments appear as icons)

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 1


The command to (re-)enable in-line attachments once disabled (attachments appear as documents or images displayed in-line)

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 0


I've seen longer boolean variants of these commands, but if you remember that in binary,1 = ON, 0=OFF, it is easy to understand.

How to attach an attachment as an icon and NOT within the body of an email in Mail?

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