Forwarding Address: OS X

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

So lately I've been seeing mail messages with people's photos in them. This is odd since they weren't HTML emails. They were just plain old text messages. No funky X-headers either.

mail-icon.png

What's going on here? I think I have the answer. If you are using Mail.app, when you get a message from a mac.com address, Mail.app will then make an HTTP request to homepages.mac.com looking for a thumbnail. If it finds one, it will display it with the message.

How do you get the thumbnail? You have to enable it in the webmail preferences in your .mac account. "Big deal," you say. This feature is listed on the first page of the .mac tour. Indeed it is. But you only have to use the webmail interface to upload your photo. After that, it's all taken care of by Mail.app on the recipient's end. I'm assuming that they make you use the upload interface so they can scale the image to the right aspect ration. At least, that's my theory. [ Discuss]