I’ve just started using eM Client and like it quite a bit – and was planning on buying the upgrade. But now I’ve discovered something that is a maddening and confusing problem. I notice that EVERY email I send (from either of two accounts with the same domain) includes a thumbnail sized company logo to the left of the “From” and “to” lines at the top. I notice that the messages I get from eM Client have a logo with a circular purple background with a white ‘S’ on it and what appears to be part of the sun rising over that. Similarly, this message will exhibit a “blank” or generic thumbnail in that same position once I post it. Why? And how do I suppress the display of these.
My problem is that the logo being displayed is for my wife’s now defunct company (which was associated with the domain we still use), and it’s completely inappropriate for personal emails. But I can’t see how it’s being included in the messages. My GUESS is that eM Client isn’t actually including in the message itself (since it doesn’t appear in the Gmail web interface for messages), but is including it when it renders a message for display. But I simply can’t find WHERE it’s getting this logo from. I thought it might be in the contact list, but I can’t find it there.
In any event, this is a problem for me and I would like to know how to suppress display of that logo in particular – and perhaps of such logos generally. I’ve been through the tools several times and can’t find where this might be controlled. My assumption is that people that I’m SENDING messages to are not seeing this logo displayed. But it’s still pretty irritating not to be able to identify the source or eliminate it.
Thanks. Oddly, I suppose, it hadn’t occurred to me that the function of these images was as avatars. But I remain curious as to where eM Client finds the image for a given account. I would not – and never have – used the particular image showing up on my two email accounts as an avatar. I can’t imagine in what way that image is associated with ME. The discussion at the link you provide suggests that this image is downloaded from an “external source” such as Google, and that there is a “registered avatar” somewhere in an “external source” that is somehow registered for my two email accounts (which in NO WAY) are associated with my wife’s company.
I’m absolutely certain that this particular image is not used as an avatar by me, and I’m almost as certain that it’s not used as an avatar anywhere by my wife. And the ONLY place I’m aware that it can be seen is on the web site of her company (which shares it’s company domain name with our personal email addresses).
This suggests that the algorithm/heuristics for “finding” an avatar in eM Client are sophisticated to the point of being spooky and that in this case the avatar was found by a loose association of the domain name to a web site and then to an image on that site. If this is not the case, then how would I go about finding out where this avatar is “registered” to two of my email accounts – both of which share only the domain name, and neither of which is actually associated (except via domain name) with the company and web pages where the image is?
In your case the avatar comes from the domain. Like in the quoted thread, the user was seeing the Virgin.net logo. That is because the email address was [email protected]. He did not register it, eM Client just tried to find a pretty picture that matched his email address. Because there was no registered avatar, it used the domain one.
This is simply an internal thing in eM Client. It is not that every email you send, the receiver will see this avatar, unless they are also using eM Client.
So there are two things you can do:
Change the settings in eM Client so that it does not download avatars from the web. Go to Menu > Tools > Settings > Contacts. Untick Download avatars from external sources. Then close eM Client, and delete
C:\Users_username_\AppData\Local\eM Client\Avatar Cache.7xxxxx folder.
Register an avatar so that others using applications like eM Client will see what you want them to see. One place is at https://en.gravatar.com/
Thanks again. I’d already made those changes in eM Client as a result of your first response.
I do believe however, that this pretty loose and casual approach to choosing avatars may deserve some reconsideration in terms of what they’re actually representing and how that may be misleading and confusing to users. Casting the net so widely in order just to have some image to display seems a bit more designer/developer-oriented than user-oriented (“Hey, this would be cool to do!”) and, obviously in at least two threads now, induces some confusion and raises questions.
I guess my own approach is that if I don’t have an avatar somehow associated with the email address directly (e.g., in my Contacts), then I’d prefer that the software not speculate about what might accurately represent that particular address. And in fact, depending on how much intelligence is built into that speculation, I can imagine some rather alarming, if not legally questionable, results. Just a thought. But I can live with the current implementation and still appreciated eM Client very much.
Well, if you’re coming from Thunderbird, what is there to say? It’s a bit like “I know you’ve been using a rock all these years to pound nails, but we have this thing called a ‘hammer’ we think you might like better.”
There are in this case some additional issues. One of them (that eM Client should probably be concerned about) is that if the image that’s found and subsequently displayed by eM Client is under copyright (as many such images on web pages are), and particularly if the email account user does not have a right to use that copyrighted image, then the use of it by eM Client is almost certainly a copyright infringement. Whether it would be prosecuted is another issue, but why violate copyright in the first place? Why have what amounts to a corporate policy that regularly will violate copyright in this manner?
In fact, my wife has a notice on her pages that all content is under copyright – which includes this image. There are circumstances under which she would enforce this, although this is not one of those. It’s difficult to understand how this feature got past any kind of legal review of the product, and it’s not a necessary feature at all – i.e., the feature to find simply SOME image that is SOMEHOW associated with the user’s email account (but to which neither eM Client nor the user has legal rights). Just doesn’t seem like a good idea – from a risk/benefit perspective.
