don't show contact photos in mail message view How do I disable showing of the contact photos in OSX mail in the message headers in the message view? The faces distract me from the messages. They are pulled from some ldap server based contact list I guess.
I can hide them when I set the headers to "show header detail: None", but I need the headers. Custom header selection seems to be broken. I can remove some or all of them and it has no influence on what is being displayed.

I use classic layout, so I already don't see them in the message list.
OSX Mail Version 6.6 (1510)
I don't really think the images comes from an LDAP based system.
However, they're likely to come from Contact.app that fetch all users' data saved in it. Mine is full of Facebook people and pictures I see comes from their facebook profile.

Your idea to use the header personnalization might not become handy here because it only allow you to show or hide infomations contained in the mail header. And as I said a little higher, theses images doesn't come from here.

So I don't think there really is a solution to your problem here... Unless you're ready to refuse Contact.app from fetching infos on G+, Fb, LDAP etc.
Or you could use another mail application