How can I remove icons from my iPhone mail list?

Settings—apps—mail. Turn off “show contact photos”

Thanks. What a ridiculous feature.

Thanks for that helpful hint. I'm not a child, I don't need cartoon like icons to show me what type of email I'm getting. How ridiculous. Glad to see you gone thanks again.

Thank you x 10! What fool of a programmer thought this was wise? Then bury the ability to turn off? Come on Apple!

The ios 18.2 has lots of annoying (to me) new features.

The email categories and related icons don’t really help me at all, just sn annoying distraction, so thanks for info on removing them.

Also, the installation removed my lock screen and gave me a default black background wallpaper, had to dig around to fix that.

Can’t wait (not) to see what it does to my battery as well other new suprises.

Extremely distracting feature!! I was literally scared until I found this thread!

I’m curious how a change like this went out in the first place lol. Such a disaster!

Thanks for the answer!!

Settings -> Apps -> Mail - Turn off “Show Contact Photos”

Thank you for that solution. The categories feature may be useful for some folks, but the large icons are an irritating nuisance to me. Thanks to Jendev5, I've turned off "show contact photos" and the contact photos (annoying icons) are gone. I noticed that I can still turn categories on without the"annoycons" reappearing. I might even occasionally switch back into the categories scheme now that I have been able to remove this visual annoyance.

I really appreciate innovations on Apple‘s part. Not everyone of them work out to be useful and popular. However, most of them do IMHO

As someone said, "I'm not a child." I detest this kind infotainment! Not to mention how intrusive an Overlay of categories is: I receive a lot of mailings about poetry... And because a poet sometimes has a book for sale, Apple decides the icon for my poet friend should be a shopping icon! What an invasion of meaning and privacy!! Apple, get your act together.

Awesome thank you!! Why Apple thought to follow the Gmail app is beyond me. We are adults not kiddies!!

of course IMHO

Thx so much Jendev5 for the quick and easy solution to turn off the annoying mail category icons in iOS 18.2 updates. Without these icons which take up unnecessary space that now I am able to see more of the mail headings.

Thank you! It worked perfectly.

Thank you!

Same icons are in messages. Annoying and unnecessary.

Thank you for the fix. Don’t require stupid icons.