E-mail attachments appear as viewable page- want icon only

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Level 1

11 points

E-mail attachments appear as viewable page- want icon only

I send many e-mails a day with word and pdf attachments to them, to clients. Two things I struggle with and hope to solve.

1- I use the Mac mail system. When I attach a document, sometimes only the icon shows, and sometimes the whole page shows. From reading other posts, it looks like if the attachment is only 1 page, the whole page shows on my screen. I DO NOT want that. I print my e-mails for my files and when the whole page shows, an e-mail that should be 1/2 a page turns into a 4-page e-mail. A waste of paper and space in my files. How do I make all the attachments appear as icons? I have tried right click, "show as icon" and that makes only the icon show on the screen, but when I print the e-mail, the entire page of 1-page attachments print (although smaller), making the e-mail way too long. HELP!

2- is there a way, when I attach files, for them to appear in a separate line at the top of the message, like for windows/outlook users? I absolutely hate that whereever my cursor is at the time I do the attachment, that's where the attachment goes to. I often compose e-mail and then go back to revise something, forget to move the cursor, attach, have to delete, and go back and reattach.

Also I get Windows users who get very confused by my e-mails and keep replying and saying there was no attachment. I don't know where attachments show up on the other end but I'm getting issues with that, too.

Thank you to any one who can give me solutions!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Aug 23, 2013 1:04 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Csound1

Level 9

59,972 points

Aug 23, 2013 1:24 PM in response to flammajamma

Right click on the attachment (displayed as viewable page) in the mail and select, View as Icon.

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Answer 2

elmnt

Level 1

27 points

Sep 4, 2013 12:34 PM in response to Csound1

This is easy enough to do on any individual message. I think the trick most people are looking for is how to make this a default on ALL messages.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20130223000057486

From that link:

Turn off automatic attachment preview in Mail

Mail, by default, provides a preview of attachments in can read, such as graphics and PDF files. However, you can run a command in Terminal to turn this off. Run the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Quit Mail and relaunch it. When you view a message, all attachments will be shown as icons only.

To restore the original functionality, run this command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool no

Found on StackExchange.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/24569/turn-off-automatic-preview-in-app le-mail

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Answer 3

Csound1

Level 9

59,972 points

Sep 4, 2013 1:06 PM in response to elmnt

Try Attachment Tamer.

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Answer 4

flammajamma Author

Level 1

11 points

Sep 5, 2013 8:58 AM in response to elmnt

This fixed the problem perfectly. I had to google how to run a command in Terminal but easily found that. I submitted the command, tested it, and this took care of the issue. Now my e-mail attachments always show the icon only, no preview. Exactly what I wanted.

THANK YOU!

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Answer 5

Fogdog99

Level 1

4 points

Oct 31, 2013 1:44 PM in response to elmnt

This is great! Thank you. I can't believe such an obvious change takes a terminal command but whatever. Thanks for your help, now I can I can use Mail rather than Outlook. Sweet!!!

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Answer 6

Cosman

Level 1

30 points

Nov 24, 2013 5:24 PM in response to Fogdog99

Doesn't work in Mavericks. Too bad.

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Answer 7

Lucian0

Level 1

0 points

Jan 16, 2014 1:25 PM in response to Cosman

It works for me in Mavericks - got an iMac and the latest updates to Mavericks and I followed the terminal command if that's what you meant.

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Answer 8

Jan 21, 2014 4:19 AM in response to Lucian0

I have 10.9.1 (no idea what animal name that is) and the Terminal entry did not work for me either. Did I use Terminal correctly? I copied and pasted the line into Terminal, hit Enter, then closed the Terminal window - is that what I should have done? Does anyone have a solution that can be used on 10.9.1?

Many thanks for your help.

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Answer 9

jrwalco

Level 1

0 points

Jan 22, 2014 9:17 PM in response to flammajamma

I'm running Mail 7.1 on 10.9.1 as well. (PalmerMac, that's Mac OS X Mavericks.) None of the following worked for me to disable inline attachments.

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool true

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool 1

The sad thing is that Mail was displaying attachments as icons as per my preference until I started fiddling around with the converse of this command to meet a specific need. Now I fear my icons are lost forever (sigh).

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Answer 10

jrwalco

Level 1

0 points

Jan 22, 2014 9:19 PM in response to Lucian0

Lucian0, would you mind elaborating on how you were able to modify the inline-vs.-icon appearance of your attachments? I feel silly asking but I'm at my wits' end.

Thanks much in advance.

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Answer 11

Lucian0

Level 1

0 points

Jan 23, 2014 2:23 AM in response to jrwalco

Hi jrwalco

I followed the link above and then just followed the instructions. It's still working now for me:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20130223000057486

Hope that helps

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Answer 12

Jan 26, 2014 3:49 AM in response to Lucian0

Hello,

the command

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

is not helping me: Both received and sent emails look very unstructured. If the attachments are Office files (word, excel, powerpoint) then they appear as icons. Pictures and pdf files, however show up as they are but I would like them to be icons as well.

Is it possible the file com.apple.mail..... is not existing? Where can I find it? I have already looked in ~/Library/Containers but here I realized the problem beyond my IT knowledge.

If somebody could tell me what I should be doing to fix the problem it would be great

I should say my Mac is a Macbook Pro (2012) and the operating system is OSX 10.9.1 (Mavericks). The problem did not occur before changing to Mavericks, but I'm not sure whether this is related to it.

Thanks

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Answer 13

Al Hatch

Level 2

213 points

Feb 1, 2014 11:30 AM in response to Charles2861

This Terminal command no longer works in Mail 7.1 under Mavericks. I have reported this to Apple as both a feature request and a bug. You should too.

http://www.apple.com/feeback

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Answer 14

Mar 18, 2014 11:21 AM in response to elmnt

A MILLION points / thanks for this elmnt.

Apple has lost its touch with "ease of use". Where is the Mail viewing or composing prefs to toggle icon viewing (ver 7.2)? To have to resort to "defaults write..." Is absurd.

-thanks again. Problem solved.

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Answer 15

May 17, 2014 8:30 AM in response to Csound1

ccsound1 said to right click on the image attachment and choose "view as icon".

This worked - thanks so much. No way was I going to go back and forth between Terminal - sometimes I DO want to send as an image, sometimes that doesn't make sense -- this was easy, thank goodness -- I thought 'how silly to have to do a big runaround on (what should be) a super-simple thing!'

Thanks!

PS - I have Mavericks on a Mac Book Pro and this worked like a charm.

And yes, I have right click enabled on it. 🙂

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