Avatar in emails and contact details

Question

My email client (eM Client) shows some of my contacts with an avatar against their name.

I have asked eM Client support how I can add one for myself, so that other people see my avatar when they view my contact details or emails, but they just give me very unspecific answers such as "It's stored on the server".

I have replied several times to try to clarify with no success. It's got to the point where I feel they actually don't know and can't be bothered to find out.

Too many of my contacts have these for it to be purely related to my client so there must be a standard way to do this.

If this is something that needs to be done by my email provider, fine, but what do they need to do exactly?

If not, what do I need to do?

PLEASE NOTE: I don't want an avatar to appear on web pages such as this one, or even in an email signature. I'm talking about avatars that appear in emails and contact details in client-side email software.

Answer 1

From the eM Client website:

eM Client now automatically downloads and displays avatars for your contacts from the web. We download from Gravatar, domain icons and more.

Gravatar is a global avatar service:

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

In the case of the LinkedIn example, it's probably the website favicon or similar, or LinkedIn have created their own Gravatar. As I said in the comments, it will probably also pull down profile pictures for users of GMail, Yahoo! and other similar services.

Answer 2

I suspect that one source of contact images is probably Google accounts (as you say, there isn't much official information on this).

To check your public Google account image, have a look at this question, and in particular this answer. Simply copy the following link, replacing the email address as appropriate:

https://pikmail.herokuapp.com/[e-mail]

This definitely provided the same image for one contact that I just added in eM Client. Note that you can set up a Google account with a non-gmail email address.