How to Disable Automatic Link Previews in MacOS Ventura

Hover your mouse right next to that preview in your email and see the little "v" appear. Click it, then choose "Convert to plain link". Really fast and easy. (I have Ventura.)

kaviji wrote:

It's a painful feature that has triggered clients spam filters twice now and i seriously don't want this feature without the ability to turn it off.

Painful or not, it cannot possibly trigger clients spam filters.

It only affects how you see the e-mail message, not its content, so when it's sent, it has zero effect.

Sorry but a clients email program returned it as it had triggered their filter. They read it as an 'icu' file and returned it. You may not believe this but that is exactly what happened.

I resent it as the usual text and it was fine.

Oddly enough, in my mac (running Ventura 13.0.1), the default seems to be leaving the link as is, no preview...

I never changed any of this, as in fact I only use plain text mail, but in testing for this thread all cases produced just the link until I deliberately changed it.

Maybe there is some hidden setting...

Workaround:

In the Mail app on your Mac, do one of the following in your message:

Choose Format > Make Plain Text (available only when the current format is rich text). Plain text format doesn’t include formatting (such as bold or italic text) or items like tables and images, but is readable for all recipients.

and uncheck the box further down "use same format as original email"

This annoying "feature" is why I am on this forum. I was searching for a way to disable it and super irritated that there's no preference for this.

The only thing I can find that seems to be helpful is to do a "paste and match style" (found in Edit menu). You can memorize the shortcut and when pasting links, instead of doing CMD-V, you can use the shortcut and it seems to work somewhat reliably. Very annoying but at least it's better than multiple steps.

This worked for me. Thank you!

It's just one little extra step...Pressing CommandK before pasting the URL. I can live with that.

But I agree - who thought we'd always want a preview?! Not someone with a lot of business experience, I'd guess.

Chiming in here to state that yes this is really annoying.

There should always be a method to opt out of such "features".

I need to be able to paste links into emails without all the formatting and preview garbage being "automagically" generated. The vast majority of the time (all the time?) I just want plain text emails. Thanks but no thanks.

Agreed is it is awful and not only that it doesn't work. I've linked to movies and if you click on the wrong part of the "link" (sic) the recipient sees a JPG not a movie.

I now put the link in "...." which preserves the link but it is all effort to overcome this junk idea.

I doubt the programmer was 17, more likely a student with a summer project.

Claas,

Thank you VERY MUCH for posting this simple and effective workaround to turn off automatic previews of links added to Apple Mail messages. Your workaround tip should be the first thing that people see when they are directed to this question on the forum. Unless I had scrolled way down and read many other comments first, I would have missed this. I wrote it on a PostIt and stuck it on my iMac Pro.

I truly hate how Apple makes unnecessary changes to its programs, and then refuses to admit that they were wrong and get rid of them. They have done this before and, no doubt, will continue to do so. For example, in Apple Mail I used to be able to flag email messages with a color-coded dot on the left of the listed messages, so that I would know that I want to return to them later, but in an update to Apple Mail, Apple removed that extremely useful feature. Now, if I flag a message, that color-coded flag is only visible when I click on or open that particular message — which is pretty much useless. I complained to Apple about that but they never did anything to fix it.

Jan

VikingOSX. Edit menu > Substitutions [off] makes no difference. Link "previews" persist.

I suppose one solution is to use a different email client. There are a variety of desktop app alternatives to Apple Mail out there, though switching email clients could/would be a PITA.

This is unacceptable. I create documents on overleaf and want to send links to them. The writable and read-only links appear with the same image in Apple Mail. Who ever thought that this new "feature" is an improvement? That person's manager should be fired.

I have found that you post the first link, waste time turning off the feature by mouse over at the top right, Click "Convert to Plain Link". All this is unnecessary as we should be able to disable something as bad as this in Preferences. However the good news is that subsequent links are put in as Plain Links.

I hate this "feature" with a vengeance.

This is one of the most poorly implemented 'feature' in a long time. and, it's getting worse. Anytime I share a link in emails it causes me issues. Forget about sending a URL to a multi-page PDF - that's an absolute disaster.

It's really bad if you want to manually type a slug after pasting a url. It will create the preview while you're typing, causing you to have to then tell it to remove the preview, then you have to remove formatting, then you can continue to type.

I cannot put into words just how horrible this 'feature' is... which cannot be turned off as a setting.

Never ever ever have I heard of anyone receiving an email appreciate having a preview. It's actually quite the opposite - everyone hates getting them. It causes confusion, errors, previews of page 1 of a pdf as a PNG attachment (which not only causes confusion but makes the recipient(s) think that I'm incompetent.

This causes me more time, frustration and issues using mac mail for business use. It's terrible, useless and embarrassing.

This is a crazy bad idea and very really slowing my workflow dow. I really can't understand if this is tested by anyone that uses e-mail all day how someone could even think this serves the user's in a good way.

In more that 10+ years usage of MacOS this is the second time I post something on this forum. It is so frustrating.