Change Apple Mail link default to plain link

By default when I paste a URL into an email it uses the 'preview' style link which contains the open graph info. I just want plain links by default, but can't see where to set that behavior and don't see any reference to this issue online?

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.0

Posted on Nov 9, 2022 10:11 AM

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Posted on Sep 13, 2023 9:39 PM

In Sonoma there's a setting for this, which I turned off as soon as I saw it.

I understand the thought behind this behavior, but nevertheless I don't like it. Maybe I'm old, but it's extremely disturbing to not just see the url, and I guess that all of us in this thread feel the same way.


102 replies

Feb 16, 2023 2:06 AM in response to lzevon

I agree. Just. Plain. Awful.

The preview links very often don't work (correctly) at the receiver's end. But more importantly, email get bloated enormously. An email with a few links will grow from 2Kb to 50Kb or even more. It may not seem much but with thousands of mails it really adds up.

the space in front of the URL and CRTL-K help but are a stupid workaround.

Mar 24, 2023 9:39 AM in response to lzevon

Just found out of the existence of this behaviour on a Mac of a customer of mine that does not like this at all.


Strangely enough I can not repeat it on any of my own Macs running 13.2.1. The default behaviour there is to not show the preview. I know I've been playing with "defaults write" al lot in the past to get rid of unwanted animations and other behaviour but I can't find the reason why my Mac does not do this yet. Will post here if I find out.


Another unwanted side-effect of the preview is that sometimes the preview image is sent as a separate attachment.

Apr 7, 2023 10:29 AM in response to lzevon

Apple should make this behavior a choice in the Apple Mail preferences instead of relying on hacks.

It is a pain to covert each link to a URL. They totally lost their minds when it came to this one.


I've been using for 40 years. It seems that they are drifting downhill slowly in many aspects, hardware and software.


If they don't change it within a few months, I'm going to change email software.

Change Apple Mail link default to plain link

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