Hi Gary, is there still no way to remove this icon completely? I found such feature request dates back to as early as 2015 (Remove photo/avatar silhouette in Contacts), further digging also reveals many similar posts that are asking for the same thing. So clearly this is a long-overdue feature. I, and I guess together with many other users, would really like to see a clean message thread in the message window, that is, no avatars, no monograms, no icons, just names of the sender and receiver.