Smart folder->New icons for each email account

[StR]

- or if they do the collection themselves (which would mean they "report" your image to their servers, for their app to use on other people's devices... privacy again).

That's essentially what Viber does with both avatars and phone numbers. And I agree with you about privacy issues. But then (I am thinking out loud), if the avatar is taken from the public Google profile (G+?), is that a problem? Maybe that discloses the link between the Gmail e-mail address and the G+ profile in those cases where the user disallows finding G+ profile using Gmail address (I believe there was such an option). Or, maybe I am wrong, and there is a unique [even if obscure] link between the Gmail address and G+ profile?

(And, as far as I understand, a bunch of phone-call blocking apps collect a database of "good" phones by compiling subscribers' own phones, and [I am guessing here] possibly harvesting those from the subscribers' "Contacts"?)

[Kostya Vasilyev]

This is the API:

https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people/get

You can pass "me" as the UserID, and get "the authenticated user's information" -- but this requires 1) authentication, and that requires that 2) the user grants (to the app in question) the OAUTH2 permission to "access profile info".

This is what AquaMail does to fetch the user's own profile when you add a "Gmail account" into the app.

To access info for "some other", you'd need to pass in that user's UserID, and they are not "just emails". And there is some sort of auth too.

And besides --

If auth (OAUTH2 scope grant) is required to access "the authenticated user's info" -- granted by the user him/herself -- then wouldn't accessing info about "someone else" require auth and a permission grant from that "someone else"?

[StR]

Thank you, Kostya for sharing that information.

There is also an "informal" (ad-hoc) method that can work in some (many?) cases when a public G+ exists. (Given that Gmail has been trying to promote First.Last@gmail.com addresses for quite a while, the likelihood of this working is quite high.)

If I know your name (and especially if your Gmail address is First.Last @ G), I can guess that your G+ plus page is https://plus.google.com/+KostyaVasilyev, and therefore your public avatar is https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-BxvMuKnHgP4/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAABYk/qK1tgdWs3kE/s60-p-no/photo.jpg
or the actual photo is:
 https://plus.google.com/photos/111661559774274998746/albums/profile/6021742976271800690

My point was that in this case, there shouldn't be a privacy issue.
(For the record: I am not suggesting doing anything like that. It is purely an "academic" discussion.)

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Re: If I know your name (and especially if your Gmail address is First.Last @ G), I can guess that your G+ plus page is https://plus.google.com/+KostyaVasilyev

Yes, but https://plus.google.com/+something@gmail doesn't work.

Re: and therefore your public avatar is ...

From scraping the web page? Sure, for purely academic purposes it could be done.

Re: privacy issue(s)

I only mentioned "possible privacy issues" as a conjecture about why Google does not appear to provide an API to get the profile image (or name for that matter) of an arbitrary @gmail address.

It's them who see it as a privacy issue (apparently), not me...