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Why do email clients (for example, Windows Mail) display icons (sender pictures) from several companies?

enter image description here

As you can see, Microsoft, Tubmlr, Paypal provide pictures, as well as Go Daddy, Amazon, Github, Quora, Medium, Meetup and others; however, the majority of business senders have no sender pictures.

How are sender pictures are implemented?

What I've tried already:

Let's pretend, I own [email protected]

  1. Added [email protected] to Gravatar and uploaded custom icon.
  2. Created Google Account for [email protected] and changed account picture.
  3. Added favicon.ico to example.com
  4. Added webmanifest with multiple icon sizes to example.com
  5. Tried multiple link tags in / of example.com
  6. Configured DNS server to include all required records (SPF/TXT/DMARC/DKIM) for BIMI.

No luck yet. Are they hard-coded in email client? That would be strange, because why Quora is hard-coded in, while Yahoo is not, so I may reject this theory.

I have also noticed, that sender picture depends on the full email address: there is a picture in email from [email protected], but there is not a picture in email from [email protected] .

How it is done from the sender side? What did these companies do to enable their senders' pictures to display automatically?

PS. Question moved from https://stackoverflow.com/q/58328274/106715

Update 1: The same sender pictures are displayed in Windows Mail and the Office web app.

Update 2: I've started to think that these companies created accounts on all biggest email providers like Google and Microsoft with the same email addresses. I have tested that by creating [email protected] as a brand account on Google, and all recipients using Gmail, started seeing my sender picture. There may be a similar story with Microsoft Mail/Outlook.

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5 Answers 5

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4

The use of "favicons" in a mail client is totally up to your email client. I know in Mozilla Thunderbird, at least five years ago, there was an add-on to do what you want to do; the add-on was basically set up to "hard-code" an image to use for a particular email address; IE: If the from: address was [email protected] the add-in would use a GMail icon in the inbox list.

So, if you have your own domain bogus.example.com, and there are maybe 20 people with email addresses for your domain, unlikely most mail clients would figure out to go get https://bogus.example.com/favicon.ico and use it.

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  • Thank you Mark for your input. I am not looking for a way as a user to see icons with extension. I am trying to figure out what Quora, Meetup and Tumblr did so their sender picture is displayed automatically.
    – Zygimantas
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 18:49
  • 1
    I think the Mozilla Thunderbird extension/add-on was open source; try installing Mozilla Thunderbird, and if it does not now do the "icon" magic, then you can search for the extension that does.
    – Mark Stewart
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 19:19
  • 1
    Mark, you totally misunderstand the question. Sorry.
    – Zygimantas
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 19:22
  • 1
    It could be coincidence that various email clients for those sites you mention just happen to use the same or similar method; and those email client likely only code for high-volume email senders. Hope that helps clarify.
    – Mark Stewart
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 19:25
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+50

Favicons by sender

It is possible for a sender to include in HTML emails its own favicon to be displayed by the receiving email client.

This is achieved by including an HTML tag in the header of the email, similar to:

<link rel="shortcut Icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/favicon-image.png" />

Not all email clients support this option, as there exist opinions against its use.

References:

Windows Mail app

Here these are not icons but only generated "helpful" visual aids. Microsoft has decided to add these to its Mail app in 2017 for visually indicating the source of the email, a feature that existed already in its products on Android.

If the email came from one of your contacts which had an avatar image, this image was displayed. For contacts with no avatars, they got new colorful round icons with their initials highlighted.

While it does make the app prettier overall and allows one to parse emails slightly faster, there were concerns by some users that the avatars disrupt the user interface. After over 3,000 users signed a petition demanding to remove them, Microsoft quietly added an option for turning them off.

For example, in the Outlook app this option is called "Show sender pictures in the message list" and is found in the "Reading" section of Options.

References:

enter image description here

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  • The core of the question is not about the coloured disc with the initials in them, but the actual icons for senders not in your contacts. For instance Fedex tracking updates get a Fedex icon.
    – jcaron
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 13:20
  • @jcaron: The ones with initials were in the original post. But you are right, there exist also sender icons.
    – harrymc
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 13:34
  • The favicon is only for websites, not for e-mails. I don't think any e-mail client will display a favicon linked in an e-mail.
    – jcaron
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 15:22
  • @jcaron: This feature was designed for that purpose, but I don't know about its support.
    – harrymc
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 16:47
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There is a way to register a logo attached to a domain name, this is called BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)

This is a TXT record on your DNS. Lots of mail client use this to diplay a default icon if the contact is not in your contact list.

Here is a link on a google page describing how to register your own. https://support.google.com/a/answer/10911320?hl=en

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  • Probably you are right. As I mentioned in original question, I have already tried that in (6). But at that moment, the missing part in any BIMI documentation was Verified Mark Certificate (VMC)
    – Zygimantas
    Commented Mar 20 at 19:51
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I guess that the designers of your email client have selected a set of common emails senders and associated icons with each one. Hotmail employs a similar scheme as shown here:

icons

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  • The whole question is to find out how to get an icon displayed to the recipients of the e-mails you send.
    – jcaron
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 15:23
  • I see no other solution than growing your company to become so dominant that major email client vendors choose to implement a separate icon for it when receiving an email from your company's domain.
    – Andreas F
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 16:33
  • I can't agree with this, because it's not related to domain directly, I have seen LinkedIn email addresses which has an icon, as well as adresses without sender icons.
    – Zygimantas
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 17:18
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If you own your domain and have a web site they could just grab the favicon meta data from your domain's website.

There nothing magic in that ?

And It is easy to implement.

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  • 2
    They could, but they don't and shoudn't do that, because G icon would be displayed for all gmail senders.
    – Zygimantas
    Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 13:52

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