An X-Face is a small bitmap (48 x 48 pixels, black and white) image which is added to a Usenet posting or e-mail message, typically showing a picture of the author's face. The image data is included in the posting as encoded text, and attached with an 'X-Face' header.

It is one of the outgrowths of the Vismon program developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s. There is a wide variety of programs supporting X-Faces. Most of them are Free software and based on Unix or its variations. There are online, Web based X-Face generators and well distributed programs such as KMail or Sylpheed.

Not all Email clients can handle an X-Face header. Mail programs installed on most domestic or business computers cannot deal with it. Even in the university and research environments which use Unix, there are but few installations which exploit X-faces fully by giving images for all senders and offering the recipient several views (incoming, archived, etc) on the individual or collected faces.

See also

• Favatar
• Gravatar
• NotesBuddy
• Picon

External Links

• Online X-Face Converter - a detailed description