X-Face

An X-Face is a small bitmap (48 x 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 (information technology). It was devised by [http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~jaa/ James Ashton]. It is one of the outgrowths of the Vismon program developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s. There is a wide variety of programs supporting X-Faces. Most of them are Free software and based on Unix or its variations. There are online, Web based X-Face generators and well distributed programs such as KMail or Sylpheed.

Not all Email clients can handle an X-Face header. Mail programs installed on most domestic or business computers cannot deal with it. Even in the university and research environments which use Unix, there are but few installations which exploit X-faces fully by giving images for all senders and offering the recipient several views (incoming, archived, etc) on the individual or collected faces.

=See also=

*Favatar *Gravatar *NotesBuddy *Picon *Plan 9 from User Space - Includes the faces program from Plan 9 from Bell Labs and other related tools. *KNode, the KDE news reader, natively supports X-Face for both reading posts and posting.

=External Links=

*[http://www.dairiki.org/xface/xface.php Online X-Face Converter] - a detailed description *[http://www.xs4all.nl/~ace/X-Faces/ X-Faces] - A collection of X-Faces *[http://tecwizards.de/mozilla/messagefaces/ MessageFaces] - an X-Faces extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird Email client