Very cool that this is still around from the NeXTSTEP days. Something that was common back then was to make a symlink to a particular tiff if a user had more than one email account. For example, if you made a joe@example.com.tiff file, and Joe also has the email address joe_example@gmail.com, you could symlink joe_example@gmail.com.tiff, pointing to joe@example.com.tiff, and see the same picture regardless of which email address Joe sent his message from. This was especially helpful back in the days of 40 MB hard drives, considering the size of your average TIFF file.

This might prove helpful in this case too, as you could use the same generic icon for all non-human accounts. With OS X being a mix of Mac OS and NeXTSTEP conventions, you might even be able to use aliases now, instead of symlinks.

This hint is great! I've been looking for a way to add favicons to my email, as I deal with a lot of firms and it would be nice to identify them by their website favicon. I wrote this little function that I put in my ~/.profile:

function mailfav()
{
	EMAIL=$1;
	DOMAIN=${EMAIL#*@}
	
	mkdir -p ~/Library/Images/People
	wget http://$DOMAIN/favicon.ico -O ~/Library/Images/People/$EMAIL.tiff
}

Now, if I want to download a favicon for a particular address, I run this command in a terminal:

	mailfav apps-noreply@google.com

This downloads the favicon at http://google.com/favicon.ico and saves it as "apps-noreply@google.com.tiff" in the correct folder.

pretty spiffy.

wget is no longer included by default in Mac OS X, so I suppose I should figure out how to rewrite that line with "curl"

function mailfav()
{
        EMAIL=$1;
        DOMAIN=${EMAIL#*@}

        curl http://$DOMAIN/favicon.ico --output ~/Library/Images/People/$EMAIL.tiff --create-dirs
}

just add the -L option to your curl command to follow redirects.

Add the "-L" parameter to curl to have it follow redirects, at least for instances like this one, anyway (read the man page for full details) — e.g.:

How about this (NOTE: Untested and I don't know if it'll work! I'm hoping from a little 'free' guru help here! ;-):

function mailfav()
{
        EMAIL=$1;
        DOMAIN=${EMAIL#*@}

        curl http://www.$DOMAIN/favicon.ico --output ~/Library/Images/People/$EMAIL.tiff --create-dirs
}

It's inelegant, and if the site re-directs to a domain *without* www. we have the same problem.
This should allow re-directs:

function mailfav()
{
        EMAIL=$1;
        DOMAIN=${EMAIL#*@}

        curl -L http://$DOMAIN/favicon.ico --output ~/Library/Images/People/$EMAIL.tiff --create-dirs
}

By default the limit is set to 50 re-directions, but you can improve on that by adding the --max-redirs flag.

That last one seems to work, at least with google.com

I can confirm it works in Mail v2.1.3 in Tiger v10.4.11. You just have to create the folders in question as they are not part of a normal install.

This also works with JPEG file which could make for much reduced setup time if doing manually.

This really begs to be wrapped in an AppleScript that can pull the email address and pass it to the shell script. beyond my capabilities, I'm afraid.