Gnus and Gravatar support

This last couple of days I’ve been dedicated making Gnus… fresher.

I’ve decided to give a whirl on Gravatar support. I already tried the gravatar.el lying on the Interweb, but well, it was crap: it used wget to fetch pictures, therefore was totally synchronous. Reading each mail was slower. The cache did not even have TTL, as far as I recall.

So, I’ve now wrote gravatar.el implementing the Gravatar API. Asynchronously of course. With cache, TTL, etc. Perfect. :-)

Then I’ve composed gnus-gravatar.el, implementing a washing function adding Gravatar for From field and/or Cc/To fields, like done for picons.

As I was expecting, the patch was badly received by the GNU guys, which start talking about thinks like external resources, privacy, non-free software, etc. Boring.

Fortunately, Lars allowed me to push the patch in git so everybody can give it a try. I’m now waiting for feedbacks in order to know if I will have to maintain this patch outside Gnus, or not.

Here’s the mandatory screenshot.