I don’t use, or really care for, avatars in email matters. Yet, eMclient wastes a lot of vertical space in the email preview pane, just to display the default gray (no-)avatar placeholder.
I wish eMclient had an option to turn that gray blob off, and display just the relevant from/to/etc text fields, instead. That would make room for 3-4 more lines of useful text in that pane.