You might be familiar with the concept in Gmail, when they first implemented Google+ into Gmail and used your profile photo on the Google+ network. The recipient would open your email and see a little round photo next to the sender, and it would be your custom profile photo from their social network. Today the implementation has matured a bit, and Google+ has gone away, but the feature remains. Perhaps you’ve seen it elsewhere as well, and not just at Gmail.

There are no profile photos with email

It is important to build this as the foundation of the answer to the question: Profile photos are not part of an email. There is no method of sending an email and including in it instructions for the recipient service to display a profile photo. There is no standard for SMTP that involves the transmission of any data relating to profile photos.

Gravatar etc.

Now, an email client (the application used to view your email) might support an external lookup method. This means that the software could say “I see this email came from ‘user@domain.com’, let me check this external database to see if it has a profile photo for ‘user@domain.com’.” An old and reasonably highly implemented service for this is Gravatar, where anyone can look up your email address and find a matching profile photo. This is commonly used on internet forums and blog/news comment sections, but can be used by email applications as well.

Note that such external solutions (Gravatar etc) are NOT features of Mailix or even email at all. You need to get support from the author of your email software if you need.

BIMI

A newer standard called BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) tries to solve this problem. And not so much in terms of profile photos as for displaying (company) trademarks. Don’t expect BIMI to be extremely widely supported, but it could eventually catch on. Apple now supports it with its latest operating systems. For information about BIMI, we recommend this article: https://blog.mailup.com/2020/10/how-to-authenticate-with-bimi/

Mailix supports BIMI

We support BIMI and do not charge extra to set it up for you. But since it is not supported widely by now, this won’t be done automatically but only on request. You can find documentation at another place of this website how to request it and what we need from you to set it up (hint: a graphic file in .svg format).