tl;dr To fix Mac Mail’s link preview problems, go to Settings > Mail Privacy Protection. Disable “Protect Mail Activity” and enable “Block all remote content.”
This post is pretty particular, but I’m posting it here in case you, like me, run into this problem and have a hard time finding a solution. (And if this isn’t your thing, you can still have fun trying to draw perfect circles instead.)
I upgraded to Mac’s Ventura operating system over the holidays and hoped I’d have time to let it settle in before I needed to get back to work. It went… mostly fine, but the bits that were not fine were really, really annoying.
Today’s example: Link previews in Mail.
Problem:
Dragging a browser link over to a draft message used to copy over the hot-linked page title, like this: Draw a Perfect Circle. (This is good because I need both title and the link, and there are times when I need to make lists of many, many links.)
After updating the OS, dropping a link instead popped up an oversized preview image and description, like this:
The only obvious way to get rid of the image is to click the caret symbol by each link and Convert to Plain Link. That left me with a URL and no page title.
Ok, no. I need a list, I need page titles, and I need them for dozens of links at a time. Changing each one and copying over titles is both impractical and deeply annoying. And that stupid caret kept mocking me. Rude!
/insert search montage with sped-up clock in the foreground
In Mail, go to Settings > Mail Privacy Protection. Disable “Protect Mail Activity” and enable “Block all remote content.”
Intuitive? Not at all. Helpful? Yes.
Do I feel better now? Yes, yes I do.
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J.R. Johnson 
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