A few operating systems ago, there was an excellent Terminal command that would let you disable inline attachments in Mail. What are inline attachments? Well, as you may have noticed, when you insert an image or a single-page PDF, the item plops itself right in the body of your email.
That’s kind of cool, but it’s frustrating and weird for a lot of people. And by “a lot of people,” I mean me. I like being able to drag my attachments around as icons, and while I know you can change a single attachment by right-clicking on it…
Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes the Apple Mail application. Because attachments are an easy way to transfer files through e-mail, you need to know how to save an attachment so you can access it again later. However, it’s imperative that you remember these caveats: attachments can contain viruses, and not all email applications and. One of the longest-standing complaints I see about Apple’s Mail app is that it places any images you drag into an email as inline images (which means the image appears in the email wherever you actually drag & dropped it) instead of as a standard attachment (which appears as an icon at the bottom of the email regardless of where you drag & drop it).
…that’s just not convenient to do all of the time. Luckily, the command that disables this feature is working again in El Capitan, so let’s rejoice and check it out! To do so, open the Terminal program (it’s within Applications > Utilities) and copy and paste the following text into its window:
Mac Mail Attachment Problem
Press Return, and then instead of your attachments looking like they do in my first screenshot, they’ll all be icons, like this:
I just find things so much easier to manage that way!
Mail Not Opening On Mac
If you decide you don’t like this setup, you can reverse the command by changing the last word:
And that’s all there is to it.
One more thing—be aware that if you change this on your own machine, it won’t necessarily affect how your recipients see things. For example, I put images and a PDF into an email as shown in the screenshot below:
Mac Mail Attachments As File
And this is how it showed up on the other end:
Mac Mail Not Downloading Messages
So this command is solely for your own email-attachment happiness. That’s enough for me, though!