Turn Off Mail Animations in OS X Lion [How To]

Editor’s note: This code in this post has been updated from the original to reflect a more targeted animation-disabling conmand line defaults write string.  Thanks to reader Phillip Ridlin for the alert.

Are you running Lion on your desktop and finding the new window animation functionality in Mail.app annoying? You’re not alone, apparently.

Thanks to the torrent of tech chatter on Google+ these days, in many cases led by our colleague Mike Elgan, as well as the omnipresent Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome, we were pointed to this command line solution for turning Lion mail animations on and off:

To turn animations off (they are on by default, with no method for disabling them apparent in Preferences or the mail.app UI):

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

Turning them back on, should you miss them, is easy too:

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO

If these instructions are foreign or too cryptic for you, you should heed the words of one savvy G+ commenter on Mr. Pirillo’s feed, who said “If Steve Jobs turned it on, you need it on.”

Via [Mac OS X Daily]

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