X-Face

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An X-Face is a small bitmap (48 × 48 pixels, black and white) image which is added to a Usenet posting or e-mail message, typically showing a picture of the author's face. The image data is included in the posting as encoded text, and attached with an 'X-Face' header. It was devised by James Ashton.

It is one of the outgrowths of the Vismon program developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s. Whilst many programs support X-Face, most of them are Free software and based on Unix or its variations. For example KMail or Sylpheed. The most common email programs though, as used in business and most domestic environments, do not handle X-Face, and the information is silently ignored. Even where Unix is widely used (university and research environments), it has never been adopted to maximum potential. (for example, by searching for senders by X-Face)

A further development is the Face header developed in 2005, which also allows for color images in PNG format, and can be used by the Thunderbird MessageFaces plugin and some other mail readers.


[edit] List of clients that support X-face

  • Claws Mail, GTK mail reader;
  • Hogwasher, news reader for Mac OS;
  • KMail, KDE mail reader, supports X-Faces since its version 1.8;
  • KNode, KDE news reader;
  • MacSoup, news reader for Mac OS;
  • MesNews, free proprietary news reader for Windows;
  • Gravity, free news reader for Windows;
  • Thunderbird, with either the MessageFaces or Mnenhy plugins;
  • MT-Newswatcher, free news reader for Mac OS;
  • Sylpheed, GTK mail and news reader;
  • XPN, news reader written in python, pygtk;
  • Xnews, free proprietary news reader for Windows.

[edit] See also

  • iChat has a similar though not compatible feature called picture icons

[edit] External links


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