iOS 18.5 brings new Mail toggles for contact photos and message grouping by sender without leaving the app
Apple’s iOS 18.5 and iPadOS 18.5 software updates let you turn off contact photos in the built-in Mail app on your iPhone and iPad with fewer clicks than before.
Apple revamped Mail app on the iPhone, iPad and Mac in iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.4 and macOS Sequoia 15.4 includes new capabilities such as automatic message categorization and visual changes like contact photos in the inbox.
Turned on by default, the setting can be turned off in the Mail app settings, which requires multiple steps. With iOS 18.5 and iPadOS 18.5, however, Apple brought a new way to toggle people’s pictures that only requires two taps. The same is true for the message grouping option, which is now also available within the app just two taps away.
Apple is currently testing the updates with its developers; the general public will be able to take advantage of this new setting when iOS 18.5 is released in a few weeks.
iOS 18.5 lets you toggle Mail contact photos and grouping by sender without leaving the app
To toggle contact photos in iOS 18.5’s Mail app, hit the three-dotted menu in the top-right corner and tick or untick the “Show Contacts Photos” option. This handy menu is part of the Mail app’s redesign and includes other options, like toggling the Priority Messages feature of Apple Intelligence and switching between standard list view and categories like Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions.
9to5Mac explains that you could toggle contact images before, but you had to open the Settings app, scroll to the bottom, choose the “Apps” option, select “Mail” in the list of installed apps and toggle “Show Contact Photos” in the “Message List” section. The setting is still present there, but iOS and iPadOS 18.5 give you a new, much faster way to toggle contact photos on the fly, without leaving the app.
The Mac version of the Mail app already supports showing or hiding contact photos by clicking View > Show Contact Photo in the menu. The Mail app uses people’s pictures from the built-in Contacts app to show on the left side of each message in your inbox, similar to the Messages app.
These images are not sent with your email messages, but some people deem them a total waste of screen real estate. This is an issue on small devices such as phones, but not a biggie on Macs. What I don’t like are the cheesy generic images for businesses that don’t participate in Apple’s Business Connect program and therefore don’t provide official company logos for the Mail app.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/04/03/ios-18-5-iphone-mail-contact-photos-new-in-app-toggle/
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