You Can Bring Back Apple Mail’s Minimal Layout for IPhone
The Mail app on iPhone gets a major visual overhaul in iOS 18.2 . Suddenly there was an entire AI-powered Priority inbox, smart categories at the top and an icon for each sender. For longtime users of the iPhone’s Mail app, this is a big shift—with seemingly minimal payoff.
The contact photo feature is perhaps the worst offender here, as most of the icons are just standard Apple icons. Even if you receive an email from Lifehacker, it will not display the Lifehacker website logo as if you visit the website in a browser. And this applies to the vast majority of email addresses.
Luckily, Apple seems to have listened to these complaints – in iOS 18.5 they added a toggle to completely delete contact photos. And for this you do not need to go completely into the settings.
As of this writing, iOS 18.5 is only available as a developer beta, although it should be available as a public beta soon enough. Anyone can now sign up and download the iOS Developer Beta , although I generally don’t recommend it. Developer beta versions are more prone to early bugs and issues since Apple releases these beta versions first. These issues are usually resolved by the time the public beta releases . The public beta version is also easier to install and more stable. To access this feature, I would advise you to wait for the 18.5 public beta or the wider stable release, which will release sometime in early to mid-May .
How to turn off contact photos in the Mail app
To get rid of contact photos, open the Mail app and tap the three-dot Menu button, then uncheck Show contact photos .
The column of icons on the left edge will instantly disappear, and the contents of the email will take up all the available space. Ah, the good old days.
Alternatively, you can also use the Settings app to disable this feature. This option has been around since the launch of iOS 18.2, but it’s hidden pretty deep in the Settings app. Here, go to Apps > Mail and turn off the Show contact photos option.
How to remove categories and other Mail AI features
But you may notice that you still aren’t back to the way the Mail app was. This is due to the category view and the Priority Mail section.
Both of these features can be turned off from the same pop-up menu, and you don’t have to be running iOS 18.5 either. Every iPhone running iOS 18.2 or later will see these options in the menu. Here, switch to List View to get rid of the Categories section, and then uncheck Show Priority to remove priority mail.
To learn more about removing all AI features in Mail, check out our detailed guide .