An X-Face is a small

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: th ...

(48 × 48 pixels, black and white) image which is added to a

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

posting or

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

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 Vismon was the Bell Labs system which displayed authors' faces on one of their internal e-mail systems. The name was a pun on the ''sysmon'' program used at Bell to show the load on computer systems. It can also be interpreted as "visual monitor". ...

program developed at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

in the 1980s. While many programs support X-Face, most of them are

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

and based on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

or its variations, such as

KMail Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs (KMail, KAddressBook, Akregator, ...

or Sylpheed. The most common email programs though, as used in business and most domestic environments, do not handle X-Face natively, 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 addon Display Contact Photo, as well as some other mail readers. Another approach to include the sender's picture in an e-mail was used by Apple:

Mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...

displayed the picture if the mail included the X-Image-URL header. In 1992, this feature was originally implemented in NeXTmail, Mail.app's ancestor. X-Image-URL accepts http or (anonymous) ftp to download the picture; typical size 64x64 pixels. As of Mail v4.5, the feature is no longer supported.

References

External links

* - utilities and a library for converting to and from the X-Face format * {{cite web, url=http://kinzler.com/ftp/faces/index.html, title=Faces Archive, author=Steve Kinzler, author-link=Steve Kinzler, year=2005, quote=applications that can use picons and/or X-Face mail header entries, access-date=2014-01-06 Email Usenet

See also

References

External links