Disable preview of pdf in Mail under OS X Mavericks

Known problem: Mail previews e.g. pdf attachments. I want to see it as symbol. I could right click and choose 'Show as symbol' but I want this as default. The old solution was typing into terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

which seems not to work under Mavericks any more. Does anybody have a working solution for this?

Solution 1:

Clive Galeni has created a Mail.app plug-in that sets View as icon to be default:

This update will disable attachment auto preview feature and disable inline attachments when reading messages.

It seems that there are two points of view - when composing email and when viewing.

Solution 2:

I found this here to disable PDF preview in Apple Mail, and tested in on my Mavericks.

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -boolean true

So your were close.

Solution 3:

Maybe you should have a look at a tiny plugin written by Clive Galeni. It can be downloaded from

• http://clivegaleni.com/posts/os-x-mail-disable-inline-attachments/

Just follow the instructions and you are good to go. I'm using OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and Mail 8.2.

There is an updated version of the plugin. Not sure if Clive Galeni updated all of his download-links accordingly. Nonetheless, there is a link to the updated post in the link I've posted.

Solution 4:

As far as I know, neither the terminal command nor the corresponding option in Tinker Tool work any longer, but I found Attachment Tamer that should be able to fix the situation.