Change Apple Mail link default to plain link

Logo, fonts, colors, images, etc. In emails are a must for many.

My business strips everything but plain text unless you click a button. It's been fabulous.

Some days, I actually get past the subject.

Beside the fact that this should not have been changed, the basic approach is wrong:

Instead of converting my URL to a preview link the option to convert a URL to a preview link.

Who knows – next step might be for Apple to decide to insert an "inserted link" to a preview link....

Here's a slightly less obnoxious workaround... click Command-K which is the Insert Link command in Apple mail, then paste the link in the window that pops up and press return. That puts it in the email in link view instead of preview view.

From a design POV, this creates work for the user. This should be a preference item.

In my case, I've had multiple instances where the preview/favicon combo cannot be opened by the receiver of my email - creating even more work. They broke what wasn't broken in the first place.

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.

Three easy solutions for anybody else suffering:

1) Shift + enter after URL

2) Space before link

3) Hover with mouse over prevoew > Find dropdown icon > select convert to plain link

This is ridiculous and completely disruptive when communicating via email. Apple please fix!

To default to plain link, click on the preview image. A small box with a down arrow will appear in the upper corner of the image. Use the down arrow to open a dropdown menu, which gives the option to change to a plain link. (Ventura 13.2.1)

You may have missed the point of this thread, maskmaker28. We're aware of how to change the preview to a plain link. We're asking for a way to default it as a plain link, and not have to change it each time.

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.

Check "Block All Remote Content" in Mail.app's privacy settings to stop this behaviour. A setting which imho is better than "Protect Mail Activity" anyway because the latter doesn't protect against unique urls that a sender can use to identify you.

@pirrop, oh totally. It's a silly solution, but it works in this case, and while I don't really need to be hiding my IP address and whatever else the "Block All Remote Content" does, I paste a lot of URLs into my Mail every day, so I'll gladly check this box.

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.

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.

This needs more upvotes as it's correct solution 👍.

...but that seems to require disabling Protect Mail Activity (which seems to me to be a good thing). Does Block All Remote Content also protect mail activity? Apple should just bring back the option in the Compose settings...