Change Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon Back Again

Eventually, having changed Snow Leopard Mail’s icon to something you like, you might want to change it back to the default image—perhaps you’re tired of the new one, perhaps you need a vanilla Desktop for freelance work, or whatever.

It’s not too hard.

Find mail.app in the Applications folder, highlight it and open up its Inspector pane (⌘-I).

Then follow the first two steps in the first post to unlock and change the permissions. Then all you need to do is highlight the image in the top lefthand corner, and press the Delete key. The image reverts to the previous one.

Remember again to change the permissions back at the end.

Now it’s as if you never made the change:

[John in the comments points out how an earlier version of this post used a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Thanks!]
Apple Mail, mail.app, icons, stamp, hack, tweak, customize, tips

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Tags: Apple Mail, apple mail tips, customize, hack, icons, mail.app, stamp, tweak

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27th October, 2009 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Change Snow Leopard’s Mail Icon Back Again”

1. John says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 12:35 am

   You don’t need to do all this folks!

   If you copied and pasted the icon in the Get Info pane, all you need to do is open the Get Info pane again for Mail.app, highlight the icon and press backspace/delete, and it will revert to the default.

   You might still have to change the permissions around for Mail.app to delete the custom icon though.

2. Tim Gaden says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 12:49 am

   How embarrassing! Thanks for pointing that out. It never occurred to me.

3. John says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 12:51 am

   No problem, the whole icon thing is slightly unintuitive in OS X…suggest editing the post? ;)

4. Tim Gaden says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 12:55 am

   Good suggestion!

5. Nick says:
   July 9th, 2010 at 3:12 am

   So, I liked the “highbrow” Mail icons. Changed to one of them (worked perfectly). Hated it, changed to a 2nd. When Mail is open, 2nd icon is visible, when closed it’s the first!. Reverted to original. Now, it’s the ugly first try when closed and original Apple Mail “stamp” when open. Any ideas?

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