Disable Mail Animations in Mac OS X Lion
If you use Mail you have probably seen the new Mail animations for replying and sending, where the message seems to slide off the screen. Like all the other new animations, this is a polarizing addition and some people hate it. Turning off the general new window animations in Lion doesn’t change Mails animations though, because they are separately controlled by another defaults write command.
Here’s how to disable both send and reply animations:
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool YES
As usual this is very easy to reverse if you want the Mail reply-to animations back
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool NO
I like the animation, but like the rest of the eye candy it can be distracting and even make OS X feel slower than it needs to be.
Related, if you don’t like the new interface of Lion Mail.app, you can also easily change back to the classic layout which shows the new mail on top of messages.
Update: Updated to disable both animations, thanks to Joe Ferrante for tip via comments!
to disable the send animation all together where the messages slides up out of the screen when you click send.
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool YES
All of these new animations are straight out of iOS, getting us primed for the full switchover I guess…
[...] Source < defaults, Lion > « Resuminator [...]
This does not work for case-sensitive file systems, you need to change the case of the file:
com.apple.mail
Not the lack of capital “M”.
Thanks, good catch. Was wondering why the original hint wasn’t working on my Mac.
THANK YOU for showing me this. I use Mail as my primary communications tool, and those pesky animations have been bugging me since the start, stealing my time.
Thanks again.
Your application very lot of 1 time u refresh after ur iphone gd work
I have tried this, and verified using “defaults read com.apple.Mail…”, restarted Mail, and rebooted the computer, but it still does not work. I have also tried with a lower case m in com.apple.mail. Am I missing something?
thanks for the fix. sometimes it’s the little stuff that matters.
I never noticed these animations until after I read this article, ha! Now that I see them, I don’t really mind them, but I like them to be faster (not eliminated entirely). I’d like the same for the iCal page flip–speedier, not nixed. Any ideas?
Does anyone know how to disable the animation that occurs when multiple messages are selected in Classic view? Each new one slides into the viewer and if the messages are large, you can accidentally select more than you want because Mail won’t keep up.
I tried this command to expose available animation defaults but it shows nothing, not even the ones listed above.
defaults read com.apple.Mail | grep -i anim