X-Face

An X-Face is a small bitmap (48 × 48 pixels, black and white) image which is added to a Usenet posting or e-mail 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 program developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s. While many programs support X-Face, most of them are Free software and based on Unix or its variations, such as KMail or Sylpheed. The most common email programs though, as used in business and most domestic environments, do not handle X-Face, 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 MessageFaces plugin and some other mail readers.

List of clients that support X-face

• 40tude Dialog, proprietary news reader for Windows;
• Claws Mail, GTK mail and news reader;
• GNUMail, a Mail.app clone for Linux/NeXTSTEP and Mac OS;
• Gnus, an Emacs lisp mua provided in GNU Emacs and Xemacs;
• Hogwasher, news reader for Mac OS;
• KMail, KDE mail reader, supports X-Faces since its version 1.8;
• KNode, KDE news reader;
• MacSoup, news reader for Mac OS;
• MesNews, free proprietary news reader for Windows;
• Gravity, free news reader for Windows;
• Thunderbird, with either the MessageFaces or Mnenhy plugins;
• MT-Newswatcher, free news reader for Mac OS;
• Pan, A newsreader for GNOME;
• Sylpheed, GTK mail and news reader;
• slrn with the slrnface plugin;
• XPN, news reader written in python, pygtk;
• Xnews, free proprietary news reader for Windows.

See also

• iChat has a similar though not compatible feature called picture icons

External links

• Online X-Face Converter - a detailed description and online generator
• X-Faces - A collection of X-Faces
• Mnenhy - an extension that displays X-Faces for the Thunderbird Email and News client and also for the Mozilla Application Suite and its successor SeaMonkey
• Template:Freshmeat - utilities and a library for converting to and from the X-Face format
• Image::XFace - a Perl module for encoding and decoding X-Face images
• xface-HowTo - A very short howto for creating configuration for X-Face images for the mutt Email client and the slrn News client
• MesNews - the news client MesNews supports X-Face by default. The image for own messages can be set up easily. Mesnews in FR Wiki