Knowledge base
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 Nextmail 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 Nextmail 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. The lookups are one switch in Account → General → Pictures of people; off, only Nextmail 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. Bob@x.com and bob@x.com are one person and get one mark, and a person on Nextmail 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 Nextmail 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 → General → Pictures of people and they see a mark seeded on your address instead.
Google Workspace
Fastmail