mark nottingham

Mail.app and X-Faces

Saturday, 3 January 2004

Mail already shows you a little picture of someone when they’re in your address book. Why doesn’t it send and display X-Faces? Can somebody write a plugin to do this?

(It also doesn’t display pictures in the LDAP server that I connect to at work, but that could just be its screwy, site-specific schema that Mail and Address book wouldn’t know about. Hmm, maybe those RDF people are onto something after all…)

UPDATE: MailPictures does this, as well as sending a URI for a higher-quality image in headers, so that it can be seen by other Mail.app users (thanks to bdash).

Those who receive mail from me will now see me if they have this installed (or X-Faces support). Incentive or disincentive? You decide…

Apple, please build this into Mail.app; other vendors, take note!


One Comment

bdash said:

MailPictures, available from http://www.nikwest.de/Software/ , appears to do more or less what you want. It dosn’t use X-Faces, but it’s functionality seems similar.

“MailPictures allows you to have your image show up in your mail message when you send it to a user who has the MailPictures installed.”

Hope this helps.

Sunday, January 4 2004 at 5:47 AM