Disable Mail Animations in Mac OS X

If you have used Mail for a long time, you have probably noticed 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 OS X doesn’t change Mails animations though, because they are separately controlled by another defaults write command.

We’ll show to disable both send and reply animations, but first you’ll want to quit out of Mail app, then you need to launch Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities directory). From there, enter the appropriate defaults write command to achieve the desired outcome.

Disable Reply Animations in Mail App

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

Disable Send Animations in Mail

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool YES

You’ll need to relaunch Mail app for changes to take effect, but sending and replying to emails will no longer display the animation. This can help to speed up Mail on older Macs.

As usual this is very easy to reverse if you want the Mail reply-to animations back

Re-Enable Mail Animations in OS X

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool NO

Relaunch Mail app for the changes to take effect.

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 revised Mail.app, you can also easily change back to the classic layout which shows the new mail on top of messages and displays may more messages all at once.

Update: Updated to disable both animations, thanks to Joe Ferrante for tip via comments!