Email gets personal with Gravatar and MessageFaces

It’s been brought to my attention that there is a very cool Thunderbird plugin called MessageFaces which, after you enable the option in the plugin preferences, will show gravatars in the header section of the email messages you view. We happen to think that this is terrific, and one more example of how Gravatar can be used to bring a touch of personalization where there would otherwise be nothing but the cold feel of a whitewashed internet. Thanks very much to Jens Bannmann for writing this very cool plugin!


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54 responses to “Email gets personal with Gravatar and MessageFaces”

  1. silveira Avatar

    Amazing, Gravatar is really a great thing.
    I hope in next WordPress version we have a native integration with Gravatar.

  2. Jeff Avatar

    Integration could be as simple as including the WordPress gravatar plugin with the default install. The trick will be getting a critical mass of commenters/users to add their own image. I can’t think of any way to make it easier that it currently is, so I guess we just have to wait.

  3. ChaosKaizer Avatar

    I agree with silveira, I would like to see thats happening.

  4. cyclingplatypus Avatar

    Add me to that list.

  5. nerrad Avatar

    Now if google would look at implementing gravatar with gmail – that, I’d like 🙂

  6. fatfingur Avatar

    That’s a very good plugin! And I agree with the guys above me too. I hope it becomes native in WordPress. 🙂

  7. ジェイソン (Jason) Avatar

    This is quite interesting. I wonder what it would take to modify Evolution to do the same.

    Time to start examining code….

  8. 3mind Avatar
    3mind

    yeah, native integration sounds fantastic … and hopefully gmail will make a move in that direction too.

  9. iPhone Hellas Avatar

    Great plugin! Thanks for bringing it in my attention 🙂

  10. Budak Bengkalis Avatar

    good idea, i like that 🙂

  11. James Avatar

    Yep, I’ll 3rd that. Native it people. The less plugin tweaking we need to do for essential things the better.

    Merry New Year.

  12. farfromfearless Avatar
    farfromfearless

    It would be really nice to see a desktop version of the Gravatar tool (upload/crop/manage); something that could be quite universal to implement — I think that would really increase the adoption of Gravatar as a service and concept.

  13. Theory Avatar

    I wish it wouldn’t load the default gravatar every time somebody doesn’t have one. Not showing anything is preferable! It also shunts the DispMUA icon about, which is very irritating and could be resolved simply by reserving the required space from the moment the message is opened.

    But I still like it. 🙂

  14. Dougal Campbell Avatar

    I’ve been using the MessageFaces add-on for over a year. It’s great on mailing lists where lots of people already have Gravatars 🙂

  15. storymode Avatar
    storymode

    I use Thunderbird quite often than I ever expected to. I’ll have to look into this myself.
    Thanks for the announcement!

  16. lordthaddius Avatar
    lordthaddius

    Wow awesome! I love Thunderbird, and here is yet another reason to enjoy it.

  17. […] WordPress della giornata odierna, sempre pieno di cosine utili, ..e come riporta il 1° commento a questa info….vogliamo gravatar implementato su wordpress in maniera […]

  18. Bollywood Avatar

    Yep, Ide love to see it integrates with messengers now 😀

  19. gestroud Avatar
    gestroud

    As long as we also have the option to turn it off. 😉

  20. Dr Small Avatar

    I agree too. This is awesome

  21. jandal Avatar

    Same, native integration please!
    =-)

  22. semplon Avatar

    Cool. with that i can know the sender

  23. Humberto Valentin Avatar

    I only have 2 days in my site and is work perfect, and the integration with other applications will be the next step

  24. Indigo Avatar

    Would be great if this could happen in Outlook too!

  25. gestroud Avatar
    gestroud

    LOL!

  26. Tom Avatar

    Gravatar should be one of basic plug-ins of every blog.

  27. stefan Avatar

    esta chida,bueno me boy astaluego

  28. knuspar Avatar
    knuspar

    As much as it sound slike a nice feature, do you REALLY have the need to personalize your e-mails in such a way?

  29. kOoLiNuS Avatar

    tried the plugin a while ago … it was a little “heavy” on the program performances, I’ll try it again, anyway !!

  30. Le Avatar

    Id love this to be native in wordpress. Wish there could be a hack to do this in gmail as thats what I use… but gmail does have something like this but uses its own profile images.

  31. polkadotcreations Avatar

    I’ve been using the Thunderbird plugin for a few years, and I think it’s great! I only wish more of the people who emailed me actually *used* gravatars. I mentioned gravatars to my blog readers a month or so ago, and most of them hadn’t been aware they existed.

  32. Rune Avatar

    If you’re a Mac user, you have this. It’s a plugin for Apple Address book. And Mail.app uses the pictures from Address book!


    RG

  33. Fredrik Wendt Avatar

    I, on the other hand, really miss this for OpenID. Where’s the ability to add my openID-URL and have that associated with my gravatar?

  34. Joel Avatar

    This is very nice. This should be standard in all e-mail clients.

  35. Sylvain Nomao Avatar

    I’d like to talk to you about Nomao, so if you could give me your email address, that will be great…

    Thxs

    Sylvain

  36. deuts Avatar

    Forget outlook. Long live Thunderbird!

  37. Alessandra Avatar
    Alessandra

    não estou conseguindo… pq??

  38. Ailton Avatar
    Ailton

    ailton

  39. […] está expandiéndose. Ahora hay disponible un plugin para el Address Book de Leopard y hasta uno para Thunderbird, para que cuando escribas un mail aparezca el avatar de la persona a la que se lo estás […]

  40. DJ Avatar

    thats cool

  41. waroengkopi Avatar
    waroengkopi

    test

  42. CARLOS Avatar

    Acho legal o Thunderbird e acredito que com este plugin ficou melhor ainda !!!

  43. EGG_1013 Avatar

    ola komo se ace para poner la imagen??

  44. EGG_1013 Avatar
    EGG_1013

    komo se ace para poner imajenesSS=)

  45. David Gravereaux Avatar
    David Gravereaux

    I just installed it and I love it!

    Change the default search URL (extensions.messagefaces.gravatar.url with about::config) to this:
    http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=%ID%&size=%SIZE%&default=img::blank

    And empty entries won’t display the default gravatar icon.

  46. Vidar Hokstad Avatar

    This brings back memories of the X-Face: header. For those who don’t know, X-Face: lets you inline a tiny image in your outbound mail headers, and quite a few clients support it, though it used to be more widely supported years ago.

  47. Nicki Brøchner Avatar

    What about mail for Mac OS X ?? ;o)

  48. JohnJones Avatar

    pull down icons for the address book ?

  49. omarm Avatar

    test!!!test

  50. TB3user Avatar
    TB3user

    Doesn’t work with Thunderbird 3. 😦

  51. Florian Sager Avatar

    There is a new plugin working with Thunderbird 3, see http://www.message-faces.com/downloads

  52. Hilarion Avatar
    Hilarion

    There’s “Display Contact Photo” Thunderbird 3.1 add-on that can show Gravatar avatars (function disabled by default):
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/58034/

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