It is probably most horrible, but what about the following...
Make a faces db accessable via a WWW (http) server, preferably
you send it the email address, and it returns the bitmap (pixmap?).
It probably keeps a cache with mappings email-address-to-facefile.
Write a small client program that is given an email address and returns a
face. It keeps its own cache, and only requests faces from the remote faces
server if they are not yet in its own cache (or it uses the HEAD request?).
Or you maybe could put a HTTP caching server (proxy?) in between.
Why use http? Because it exists, and as a spin-off, it would make it easy
to use faces in arbitrary pages.
A similar chaching client scheme is used by someone who uses my Say...
'page' as a remote text-to-speech translater, and it seems to work.
Regards,
Axel.
<Axel.Belinfante@cs.utwente.nl> tel. +31 53 893774 fax. +31 53 333815
University of Twente, Dept. of C.S., Tele-Informatics & Open Systems Group
P.O. Box 217 NL-7500 AE Enschede The Netherlands
"ili ne sciis ke estas neebla do ili simple faris" -- Loesje