[X Newbies] Picture Stamp on email messages?

[Michael Winter]

On Apr 3, 2004, at 11:28 AM, Barry wrote:

> Now there is probably no shortage of people on this list who already 
> knew this and could have saved me a lot of time and trouble, but alas, 
> I was curious and couldn't wait for their responses. :-) thanks to 
> Birgit Rhoads and Bob Geiger to helping.

You're right, if you would have just waited a couple days I could have 
explained it to you :-)

Just to keep the "security conscious" from worrying, I'll point out 
that (contrary to what was implied in another message) there is no case 
where Mail is accessing anyone else's computer to get any information 
(in this case a picture).

So IIRC it works like this (for Apple's Mail app only) :

1) When you receive a message, Mail looks at the sender's address, then 
looks in your address book for an entry with that email address.
2) If it finds that email address in your address book and there is a 
picture associated with it, it will display that picture in the message 
and the process ends.
3) If the sender's email address is not in your address book, or it 
does not have a picture associated with it, then Mail will check to see 
if the sender's address is a .mac address.
4) If the mail did come from a .mac address, then Mail will query 
Apple's .Mac servers to see if that user has submitted an image to be 
used with their email. If yes, it will download that image from Apple 
(not the sender), place it in your address book and display it. If 
there is no image "registered" with Apple for that email address no 
image is displayed.

All this is designed to minimize the need to download images -you only 
download any given image once.

So as for some of the "curious" behavior.

Someone changes their picture on .Mac and asks you how you like the new 
image. Problem is, you still see the same old image. The reason for 
that is Mail has previously downloaded the image and saved it to your 
address book. Since Mail always looks at your address book first, it 
won't "see" the new image unless you erase the old one from your 
computer first.

You see an image in your own email messages, but you've never set one 
up on .Mac. That's because Mail is pulling the image from your address 
book. I don't know when OS X started doing it, but somewhere along the 
lines it started automatically placing the image you may have assigned 
for your login image into your address book entry.

I hope that's somewhat clear.

-Mike