Faces

One of the cool features of KMail I discovered while running the current development branch is the support for X-Faces. These are small black-and-white pictures which are sent in the mail header. They are popular on the Usenet and when reading mailing lists it's fun to see who sends these X-Faces with which mails. In KMail it looks like this:



That's refreshingly old school. It reminds me of the 80's when I did strange things like spending time on drawing pictures on checkered paper, converting them (of course manually) to hex codes and typing the results into a BASIC program on the C64 for finally showing them as sprites on the screen.

In KMail it's naturally a bit easier to create an X-Face header. Just go to the configuration dialog, select an identity and activate the "Picture" tab. There you can specify a picture which is converted to an X-Face header:



If you prefer to do it the 80's way you can also type in something like that:

  c7,^6P_4=GpGG0Vhd-~;1};CPr3<'GRLDJ[xHv<vh#;!5ql7OXsE\.<pf!},x
  jL[+YV>`n"GD!05-n3@bSb_dX#|q9fjX%^#B

Mastering twenty years of computer history. That's KDE ;-)