Disable Inline Attachment in Apple Mail with Terminal Command

Written By Nimisha Ramesh

Approved By Mack John

Published On July 6th, 2019

Reading Time 3 Minutes Reading

Are you searching for a dependable method to disable inline attachment in Apple Mail? Then, without any doubt, this is the right place you are looking for. Yes, we have come up with a complete solution to disable Apple Mail Inline Attachments. Before moving towards the solution, let us begin with the difference between inline and attachment without wasting the time.

Difference between an Attachment and Inline Attachment?

An attachment is any document that you need to click icon first in order to view the corresponding content in it. Whereas an Inline Attachment is a document that forms a part of the body of an email and you do no need to click on it in order to view the contents. Both the files are shown below: in1

Problem faced by users

I have come across the situation where users are facing this problem even after so many years. The users have frequently asked these questions:
“How can I turn off the embedding of any attachments into the message body and just displaying them as a ‘file’ icon somewhere rather than the contents?”
“When I send out an image – the recipients are receiving them as embedded images instead of simple attachments. I know in the previous version of mail, having windows friendly attachments enabled solved this, but it doesn’t seem to be helping”

How to Disable Inline Attachment in Apple Mail by Manual method

Right-click on the image and select “View as Icon”
Every time using this method can be very disturbing for the user to disable Inline Attachment repeatedly for each image. in2

How to automatically disable Inline Attachment

You can make use of some Terminal Command that will force every image to open as Icon.
Follow these steps:

Use the Finder to search for Terminal application
Go to Applications and scroll down to find an option named “Utilities”
Click on the “Terminal” Application to open the command prompt

Note: Make sure that you enter the correct Command in the prompt as it might be very dangerous to change things using the terminal.

When you see the terminal command prompt open. Type the following Command:
defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes
After you have entered this command, Press enter and go to Apple mail, it immediately shows an icon.
If you want to disable this feature Write the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool false

Restart your mail and it is again back to default.

Conclusion

Since this facility is not provided by the Apple Mail. This article has been created in order to help users who frequently send or receive a lot of emails consisting of images. So, the user prefers to have Inline Attachments in Apple Mail.