when i attach a jpg to an email, it opens up in the body of the email, i want it to aend as an icon. can someone please help? thank you

I just want the attachment to be sent and received as an icon.

What you want is not in your control. The recipient's email client decides how it will render the email message.

Mail sends all single-page attachments with an inline directive. How the recipient's email client interprets that directive and displays the attachment is controlled entirely by the developer or that app. They may offer the user settings to adjust that, but I don't know of any.

If you want to be able to control that directive, you should look for another email client. I don't have any suggestions.

Put the image file in a folder and add the folder to the email or compress the image file ( you won't same much space as jpegs are already compressed) but it will not display in the email.

Are you using RichText as the format of your emails or plain text. If RichText change it to plain text and see if that will do what you want. Otherwise, do what I suggested earlier.

how it looks for you, may not be how it looks for the person receiving the mail, there is no way you can control how their email client display the mail.