What are Picons?
"picons" is short for "personal icons". They're small, constrained images used to represent users and domains on the net, organized into databases so that the appropriate image for a given e-mail address can be found. Besides users and domains, there are picons databases for Usenet newsgroups and weather forecasts. The picons are in either monochrome XBM format or color XPM and GIF formats."
The Picons FAQ is at
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/picons/ftp/faq.html.
Picons and Zoe
Picons are retrieved automatically for display with a message/user/domain.
How does Zoe retrieve the Picons
Here is a somewhat frivolous hack (pulled from the mailing list) to retrieve picons from
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/picons/.
- For a given object (SZName, SZOrganization, SZTLD) it will construct an url to point at indiana's picons database.
- It will first check if this icon was already downloaded in ../Library/SZ/Faces/ using the icon's url path.
- It will then check if the icon failed to download previously by looking for a "unknown" marker.
- Finally, it will try to fetch the icon from indiana and write it down to disk. Or mark it as "unknown" if it fails.
Preferences