How can I remove icons from my iPhone mail list?

Extremely distracting feature!! I was literally scared until I found this thread!

I’m curious how a change like this went out in the first place lol. Such a disaster!

Thanks for the answer!!

Settings -> Apps -> Mail - Turn off “Show Contact Photos”

Settings—apps—mail. Turn off “show contact photos”

Actually, I found out you don’t have to do the turn off contacts move. You can just turn the size of the text up on Mail only and they will go away.

You could also just turn up the text size on the mail app until they disappear. I found that works too.

Again, if you just increase the font size a little bit in the mail app they will disappear

Thank you for that solution. The categories feature may be useful for some folks, but the large icons are an irritating nuisance to me. Thanks to Jendev5, I've turned off "show contact photos" and the contact photos (annoying icons) are gone. I noticed that I can still turn categories on without the"annoycons" reappearing. I might even occasionally switch back into the categories scheme now that I have been able to remove this visual annoyance.

I really appreciate innovations on Apple‘s part. Not everyone of them work out to be useful and popular. However, most of them do IMHO

The ios 18.2 has lots of annoying (to me) new features.

The email categories and related icons don’t really help me at all, just sn annoying distraction, so thanks for info on removing them.

Also, the installation removed my lock screen and gave me a default black background wallpaper, had to dig around to fix that.

Can’t wait (not) to see what it does to my battery as well other new suprises.

As someone said, "I'm not a child." I detest this kind infotainment! Not to mention how intrusive an Overlay of categories is: I receive a lot of mailings about poetry... And because a poet sometimes has a book for sale, Apple decides the icon for my poet friend should be a shopping icon! What an invasion of meaning and privacy!! Apple, get your act together.

Thx so much Jendev5 for the quick and easy solution to turn off the annoying mail category icons in iOS 18.2 updates. Without these icons which take up unnecessary space that now I am able to see more of the mail headings.

Even though I’ve turned off contact photos and disabled Mail categories, the icons still appear at the top of individual emails (though not in Inbox list), taking up valuable text space. How do I get rid of those?

Thankyou Jendev5!!!

Spent 2 days trying to remove the new huge colorful and INANE STUPID CHILDISH UNNECESSARY AND INTRUSIVE icons from my gmail inbox listing...and you made it clear and simple! Thank you very much!

For me, the picture icons were really helpful because I can’t read so I had no clue who was sending me emails. Now if they can just replace the words in the emails with pictures, I will be all set. /s

On a more serious note, Thanks Jendev5

My iPhone just updated last night with this, Thank you so much!

I despise having some of these so called “improved” features pushed on me and then searching how to turn them off. Agree with the others- I’m not a child and don’t need the cartoon-like ‘feature’

Thanks. I googled How do I turn off this useless feature and got here, very grateful.

it’s a bit like coming downstairs one morning and finding your front door has been painted bright red with a note saying that it was decided everyone would love red front doors.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Give us the option at upgrade not to have these features that can be so incredibly annoying.

My mother in law was using an iPad until she died at over 99. I don’t know how many times she said, Why do they keep changing things? I then had to find how to turn off the new feature or teach her how to cope with the intrusive unremovable feature.

Thank goodness this thread exists! The icons are so busy. I started to look for another email programme because I just couldn’t do emails with the change. Too much going on/ visual distraction! I’m so happy to change back to no icons and no categories!