Libravatar plugin for Claws Mail
================================

1. What is it for?
2. Network issues
3. Cache details
4. Reporting bugs

1. What is it for?
------------------

This plugin allows showing the profile picture associated to email
addresses provided by https://www.libravatar.org/. You can read
more about what is this at http://wiki.libravatar.org/description/.

By default missing profiles in the libravatar site are also searched
in http://gravatar.com, so it will also show pictures from gravatar
profiles. This can be turned off by disallowing redirects.

When profile is missing in both sites there's options to use a
'generated' avatar instead. It's also possible to not generate
anything. In that case no image will be added and the existing
Face/X-Face machinery will operate as usual, allowing to show the
avatar images provided by those headers when no profile picture
exists in the servers.

2. Network issues
-----------------

This plugin requires a reliable network connection to work. If your
connection is unreliable or has high latency you're going to experience
delays when viewing messages for first time (or always if you disable
cache, which is not recommended, of course).

Another option to alleviate high network latency is to install a local
libravatar server (see http://wiki.libravatar.org/running_your_own/),
then change the “base_url” hidden property on your ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc
file to point your local server URL instead of Libravatar project's URL.

Yet another option is using a caching proxy on your network.

This plugin uses libcurl to download images, so proxy support is
already implemented. You just need to set the “http_proxy” variable
in your environment before launching Claws Mail (see ENVIRONMENT
section in curl(1) manpage for details).

3. Cache details
----------------

This plugin saves retrieved images for later reuse instead of making
a network request on every message. Cache directory is in
~/.claws-mail/avatarcache. Does also save the missing ones in a
special file to avoid filling the cache with empty files.

You can control how much time will be kept there before trying to
download them again. Missing items are valid for more time, 7 times
your configured interval cache time. You can disable the image cache,
but notice that write access to avatarcache is still required.
Missing cache cannot be disabled.

4. Reporting bugs
-----------------

The TODO file contains more known issues/enhancements, please read it
before reporting bugs.

-- 
Ricardo Mones <ricardo@mones.org>

