Why do email clients (for example, Windows Mail) display icons (sender pictures) from several companies?
As you can see, Microsoft, Tubmlr, Paypal provide pictures, as well as Go Daddy, Amazon, Github, Quora, Medium, Meetup and others; however, the majority of business senders have no sender pictures.
How are sender pictures are implemented?
What I've tried already:
Let's pretend, I own hello@example.com
- Added hello@example.com to Gravatar and uploaded custom icon.
- Created Google Account for hello@example.com and changed account picture.
- Added favicon.ico to example.com
- Added webmanifest with multiple icon sizes to example.com
- Tried multiple link tags in / of example.com
- Configured DNS server to include all required records (SPF/TXT/DMARC/DKIM) for BIMI.
No luck yet. Are they hard-coded in email client?
That would be strange, because why Quora is hard-coded in, while Yahoo is not, so I may reject this theory.
I have also noticed, that sender picture depends on the full email address: there is a picture in email from no-reply-aws@amazon.com, but there is not a picture in email from aws-marketing-email-replies@amazon.com .
How it is done from the sender side? What did these companies do to enable their senders' pictures to display automatically?
PS. Question moved from https://stackoverflow.com/q/58328274/106715
Update 1: The same sender pictures are displayed in Windows Mail and the Office web app.
Update 2: I've started to think that these companies created accounts on all biggest email providers like Google and Microsoft with the same email addresses. I have tested that by creating hello@example.com as a brand account on Google, and all recipients using Gmail, started seeing my sender picture. There may be a similar story with Microsoft Mail/Outlook.
Best Answer
The use of "favicons" in a mail client is totally up to your email client. I know in Mozilla Thunderbird, at least five years ago, there was an add-on to do what you want to do; the add-on was basically set up to "hard-code" an image to use for a particular email address; IE: If the
from:
address waspage_rank@gmail.com
the add-in would use a GMail icon in the inbox list.So, if you have your own domain
bogus.example.com
, and there are maybe 20 people with email addresses for your domain, unlikely most mail clients would figure out to go gethttps://bogus.example.com/favicon.ico
and use it.