How to Disable Automatic Link Previews in MacOS Ventura

pra6, agreed, except for the age. I think up to 12 years, a developer would do no such thing, then between 13 and 15 perhaps, but again no longer after reaching the wise age of 17.

Since I'm replying anyway:

1- I'll report the impossibility to turn this off to Apple as a bug.

2- There are more and more “features” I don't need or want, but cannot turn OFF.

3- One of them is spelling checking, which in the olden days one could turn off globally. Now it's only per app, but at least each app does remember. I never ever want spelling checkers because I write in a mixture of English, French and Dutch, often in the same document.

4- Mail also needs a view zoom factor, like Numbers: the new version's text display is too small for my ageing eyes, but I don't want to inconvenience my recipients by using a very large font. Just a local view zoom factor.

5- After Apple adopted the NeXT interface for the Finder and we got “column view” (and this was more than two decades ago) the width of a column should adapt to the widest name in the folder viewed. Many have requested this, and there was at least one solution: TotalFinder. But that no longer works on Ventura. The width of the column should be a property of the folder whose contents are being displayed in the column, settable by the user, and by default wide enough to display all names. But that feature, which would be a good improvement, has never made it.

I'll report all of these again to Apple.

Sigh.

4- … but I don't want to inconvenience my recipients by using a very large font. Just a local view zoom factor.

You default font/size is not sent. The only way to send any formatted text is to change it when you compose the message.

Hi,

I don't quite understand what you mean.

My Mail's settings are “rich text” and Helvetica 18.

It is much more confusing I just found out: my wife's Mail font is set to ”Chalkboard”. If I send her a message in rich text, in which I have selected some text and explicitly made it Helvetica 36, it arrives in Chalkboard (but 36).

This is not what rich text is supposed to do.

Or am I missing something?

You can set whatever you want, but so can she. A recipient can override what you set.

If you want to control the layout of a message to that degree, you probably should be sending a document, not an email.

BUT this is topic drift. Fonts are unrelated to the issue this thread is about.

Robert, thank you so much for forwarding Tom’s workaround…!

It’d be nice indeed to collect all these hacks on a blog page / archive somewhere.

About the UI/UX: it pains me to see how the legacy is fading away and how sloppy the design and thoughts behind the products has become… All the small details that made macOS so great are being neglected / removed / substituted by weak alternatives.

Andreas, my reply was removed.

I have changed it and hope this version gets through:

Andreas, I do agree.

One trend that does not help is the move towards the touch screen interface. The touch screen (invented at CERN by one of my erstwhile colleagues, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Stumpe) is a useful device, but like many other good things in life, such as wine, it should be used with moderation.

Another point is that in the 70s and early 80s there were less than 5% of people who actually had a computer, and all of them did something useful with it. This has not changed. 

Though 99% now use a device of some sort that contains a computer, they are just pressing buttons and consuming the information that is presented to them. That is not wrong in itself. The people who “design” the devices and the software are only catering to that usage made by that part of the population.

Sigh.

There is unfortunately no real alternative: the Linux people follow the reasonings from “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.

I'll post the link to the gripes page as soon as it is palatably ready.

It's what I've been doing too

Not detracting from the annoyance of this issue, which should be addressed, but unbelievable your simple solution hasn't been mentioned before now here, ha (I suppose I'm guilty of not posting)

Regards

I'm not trawling through all the posts, but I think I mentioned that typing any character before pasting would do it.

Templemann's incantation does it.

But I'm now getting previews in mail I receive. Probably from people who send it from Mail in Ventura.

I usually WANT to see the image preview when I paste a link into an Apple mail email, but I often don't. How do I make sure it does? It seems quite inconsistent. Sometimes, a preview pops up when a url is inserted and sometimes not. How do I control this?

Perhaps it depends on how many images are on the linked page, and what type they are. It does not seem to me that it is a screenshot of the page as it appears in a browser. Maybe it is even a picture the site provides in a way similar to the bits and pieces iOS asks for, but that are exclusively related to Apple's desires.

I'm not even going to dig into this, put perhaps someone will.

I just want a setting to switch it OFF.

:-D :-D

Yeah, I also always feel better when letting off steam.

I and others have reported this “feature” to Apple already.

But see Tempelmann's fix, it does work. And get Bresink's “Tinkertool” for other settings that are hidden.

Moreover, there are many more things Apple should fix instead of spending time on aesthetics. I'm just back from giving a talk in Sweden, and found out there, on stage, that the trackpad does not respond if a mouse is plugged in... (”why would you need that?”)

Note also that “letting off steam” dates back to the 1800s. ;-)

Oh my, this needs to stop.. Pretty please! Maybe a tickbox option to turn this off for ever in the advanced settings?

It is single handedly the most useless, slow and layout disruptive feature ever to grace the Mail interface (which I otherwise like).

Please!

sonkasaurus: yes, and several of us have already written to Apple about this, reporting on the product feedback site.

The Mail interface is abysmally bad compared to that of the (long gone) Eudora.

just two examples:

— I use several viewer windows, to file and view messages, and have a fairly deep hierarchy of mailboxes. But the viewer windows do not keep their views: if you open a folder in one window, then it also opens in the other widows (though not immediately, it depends on the sequence of operations). In Eudora a viewer window could concern a folder, in Mail each window always shows all folders.

— to file messages, and again depending on sequence of operations, dragging a set of messages from one window to another does not work, and certainly it is not possible to drag into the list of messages, only onto a folder icon.

Also:

Eudora had a send schedule time already in 1993, Mail finally got it just now.

Have you ever received messages with the subject line missing, or not relevant to the content? In Eudora you could edit the subject line, so that it was easy to sort by the significant subject, not the erroneous one from the sender. (the sender's original was still there too of course, and unmodifiable, the edited one was “shadow”). Much more productive.

And on and on.

I want Eudora back... But then I always put productivity before appearance.

:-)

True, of course.

I have looked into other mail clients but not found anything suitable, though that was a while ago.

Don't worry: I do use the feedback to Apple as soon as I can't find a solution on a forum or elsewhere.

As to ”very old, discontinued”, that is to be qualified.

I know some very old things that are still perfectly suitable (myself, for example, still OK at 76).

Or the Lego bricks I played with more than 60 years ago and are now used by my grandson.

One of the worst things in computing these days is the ”obligation” to change every so often, without any good reason. Just fashion. I've often read things like “it has not been updated in five years” as if that is equivalent to food having gone bad. My wife has not been updated in a much longer time.

So, yes, a new version of Eudora would probably look different, but the useful functions would still be good.

There is too much attention to “skin” these days.

Pavlov and his dog: people have been trained to expect something new every October.

But usually it causes me a lot of trouble: functions that have been taken away or have been inaccessibly hidden are the worst.

Mind you, I understand very well the problem of “bloatware”. I can also see the reason for removing something that is simply not used anymore: there are no longer laptops with CD readers. Those few who still need them can buy an external drive, and at least they can do so.

Then there are things that are tried, found bad, and the change reverted, such as the irritating touch bar.

Or the removal and reappearance of the magsafe connector.

Then there are great advances: USB-C being the one I like best.

The other one is the M2 chipset.

But the removal of the independent locale settings (which I reported in a different topic, and to Apple) nearly made Ventura completely unsable to me. Fortunately there is a workaround (the function itself is still there, obviously, but the normal user cannot get at it anymore).

Link preview in Mail is one of the things that should be a switchable option.

This works for me to turn off link-previews in outgoing emails AND to not download images (aka "remote content") in incoming emails:

in iOS/iPadOS: Settings> Mail> Privacy Protection>

Privacy Protect Mail Activity [OFF] (..yes - believe or not, "OFF")

Block All Remote Content [ON]

No more annoying link previews in emails you are writing; no more auto-download of images (which represent a major privacy-leak, especially to spammers who can confirm their emails are being received if you allow this).