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Sender pictures

A real picture for everyone you correspond with when one can be found, and a mark seeded on their identity when it cannot.

Details

  • Five sources, tried in order, and the first that answers wins. Someone on OpenEmail shows the photo from their own account. A contact you have given a photo shows that. Otherwise Gravatar is asked, then the sending domain: its BIMI logo if it publishes one, its site icon if not. A mark is drawn when all of those come up empty, and straight away for someone on OpenEmail who has turned their photo off.
  • Every lookup runs from our servers rather than your browser, so Gravatar and the sender’s site see one request from us, never your address or the moment you opened a message. Gravatar receives a hash of the address rather than the address. Results are cached, and consumer mailbox domains are never asked for a brand, so a gmail.com correspondent does not wear Google’s logo. One photo does come from elsewhere: a picture someone brought from Google or GitHub when they signed in is served by that provider, exactly as it is on the Members page. The lookups are one switch in Account → Privacy; off, only OpenEmail accounts, your own contact photos and the mark remain.
  • The mark is a shape, not the first letter of a name. One character has twenty-six values, so a mailbox full of correspondents produced the same handful over and over. A shape seeded on the address is different for every person and the same every time they appear: in the list, on the message, in Contacts and in the composer. [email protected] and [email protected] are one person and get one mark, and a person on OpenEmail who shares their photo gets the mark their own account draws, so what they see of themselves is what you see of them.
  • On the message list and the open message, the two places a message is read, no picture of any kind is shown for a sender that did not pass DMARC through a relay we recognise. A real photo or a brand’s real mark beside a forged address is the most persuasive thing a mail client can do for an attacker, so a failed message gets the mark and nothing else. In Contacts and while composing there is no message to judge, and mail stored before these checks existed carries no verdict.
  • Your own photo, set in Account, is shown to other people on OpenEmail wherever your address appears for them. It never travels inside a message: nothing about it is embedded in what you send, and someone reading you in another mail client sees whatever that client draws. Turn “Show my photo to people I email” off in Account → Privacy and they see a mark seeded on your address instead.