Gmail Sender Icons for Chrome: better sender identification

Gmail Sender Icons is a simple browser extension for Google Chrome that visualizes the sender's domain and favicon of the domain on Gmail's website.

Gmail does not list any sender information besides the name when it lists emails received by connected accounts. Since names are picked by senders, they cannot be used reliably to identify the sender of an email.

While you can display email headers after a couple of clicks for individual emails, it is not really useful when you want to identify senders of all emails that you receive. The reason is simple: you'd spend the better part of the day looking up email headers for individual emails if you receive medium to large numbers each day.

Gmail Sender Icons

The Chrome extension Gmail Sender Icons adds sender information to email lists on Gmail. It displays the domain or organization, and the favicon of that domain next to each email.

If you receive an email by [email protected] for instance, example.com is listed on the left side of the email on Gmail, and the site's favicon is listed there as well.

Gmail Sender Icons is a Google Chrome extension that makes it easy for you to identify the domain (or organization) of the email sender. For instance, if you receive an email from [email protected], the Gmail extension will add a virtual label google.com to your email message and also a favicon for the Google website.

The favicons and the domain are visible across Gmail. This means that you see them listed on all email listings, including spam, and also when you run searches on the Gmail website.

The author, Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration, notes that the labels are applied virtually. All email messages are left unchanged. If you uninstall the Gmail Sender Icons extension, everything returns to normal without any leftovers.

The extension uses Google's Inbox SDK framework for the extraction of domain information from emails, and Google's S2 service for generating the favicons.

Amit notes that all processing is done locally in the web browser, and that data is never uploaded or shared.

Closing Words

Gmail Sender Icons is a useful browser extension. It visualizes sender information right on Gmail's email listings so that you see on first glance the originating domain of mails. While you should not blindly trust the information, as things can be faked, it is nevertheless mighty helpful for users of the service that use the website, and not one of the apps or a third-party program.