libravatar support

[tikank]

Just an idea that maybe libravatar can be used to find avatars for mail addresses (maybe optionally before, after or instead of current mechanism).

Libravatar (https://www.libravatar.org/) is a gravatar like service, but it is federated service and domains can serve avatars by themselves.

Its API is simple and contains calculating hash from mail address, making DNS query for domain and fetching avatar using HTTP request. I don't know if there is libraries for vala or javascript but I guess it is still implementable easily.

I think it would also require some kind of cache for avatars, so that networks operations is needed only for new addresses. And updates for cache would not need to be done frequently because avatars don't change frequently (I think).

[pulb]

This is a good idea though this should rather complement the current libfolks implementation instead of replacing it (as you suggested). Libfolks aggregates avatars from several sources like phone address books (google), Evolution, social networks and so on. Libravatar requires your contacts to create an account and I suppose not many of your contacts did that.

[pulb]

Slightly related: I accidentally discovered a gnome-shell extension that downloads avatars from gravatar. Maybe some of it's code can be used to implemend gravatar support in mailnag-gnome-shell.