Adobe attachment icon

Sorry to say, Mail is behaving exactly the way Apple has written it. Since I don't normally use Mail (for the very reason of the way it handles attachments), I didn't know they had removed the option to minimize/view as icon until you mentioned it.

When you create an email and drop in a PDF, it looks like this - to you:

But to the recipient (in Mail), a single page PDF looks like this:

So, what is that? An attachment? HTML body copy? You don't know without either grabbing and dragging within the body, which will produce this kind of duplicated look:

Or right click in the body just to see if you'll get an unexpected drop down choice for an attachment.

It simply shouldn't be this confusing for the user.

Personally, I use the free version of eM Client. Looks and behaves almost identically to Outlook. And there's no confusion to what is, or isn't an attachment. They appear as just about any other email client works. Above the body copy.

If there's more than one attachment, they'll appear in a row (or multiple rows for a lot of them), as you would normally expect. No confusion as to what is, or isn't part of the body content.

All of these test emails were sent to myself from Mail. So it isn't that Mail doesn't know what an attachment is. But rather that it very poorly displays them for the recipient.

That was a change to Mail at least a few major OS releases back. And a very poor one, as far as I'm concerned.

Depending on what type of attachment you add to your email, photos and PDFs in particular, they get dropped in as if they were an in-line part of the body copy. They appear that way even if you specifically choose the attachment option.

Worse, when you receive emails with such attachments, you often can't tell if what you're looking at is a PDF attachment, or HTML body copy. More than once I or my wife have tried printing an email, only to have part of it missing on the print out. It isn't until you click and hold on what didn't print and drag it around do you realize it's not part of the body text.

A multi-page PDF will appear simply as an icon to the recipient, but a single page PDF will appear as if it's part of the body.

I don't who at Apple though it was a good idea to run attachments and body text together as if they were one, but it was a terrible idea. It should always be clear that an attachment is an attachment. Mail used to behave this way, but now doesn't.