Email Signature Avatars

An organization can add a signature block to the foot of the emails Flowtly sends on behalf of its people, and that block can include a small picture of the sender. Whether it does is part of how the organization wrote its signature: some signatures carry a sender picture, others carry only text. If yours carries only text, nothing on this page affects the mail you send.

What the recipient sees

Where the signature does carry a sender picture, one of two things is shown:

• The sender has a photo on their account — the recipient sees that photo.
• The sender has no photo — the recipient sees a square tile with the sender's initials, in white letters on a deep indigo background.

Both are ordinary images in the message, so the recipient does not need a Flowtly account to see them. A recipient never sees an empty frame, a broken-image icon or a question mark where the sender picture sits.

Which letters appear

The initials come from the name held on the sender's account:

• A first and last name gives two letters, one from each.
• A single name gives one letter.
• An account that holds no name at all gives one letter, taken from the start of the email address.
• An account with nothing at all to draw from gets a neutral grey tile with a person symbol instead of letters.

Letters are drawn as capitals, and accented letters keep their marks — Ł, Ż and Ś are drawn as written, not stripped to plain Latin. Initials in other alphabets, such as Cyrillic or Chinese, are drawn too. A character that cannot be drawn in any of Flowtly's typefaces falls back to the same neutral person tile rather than an empty box.

Keeping it current

The tile follows the account it belongs to. Correct a name, and the next message that sender sends carries the corrected initials. Add a photo, and the photo is used in place of the tile from that message onwards. There is nothing to upload, regenerate or clear, and an administrator does not need to do anything per person.

Example use cases

• An employee who has never uploaded a profile photo emails an invoice to a client, and the signature shows a tile with their initials.
• A colleague with a photo on their account sends the same kind of message, and the signature shows the photo.
• An employee whose name is written with diacritics sends an email, and the initials in the signature keep their accents.
• An administrator is asked why some senders' signatures show a photograph and others show two letters, and confirms that both are expected.