How to get offline buddy's icon?

[Ravinder Singh]

Am using joscar on server side to build a AIM gateway for my iphone
client. Am able to get icon's for online buddies and not for offline
ones. Just curious if that is possible? If yes, can someone please
give me some hints/code samples on how to do it?

Thanks

[jadestorm]

=) Are you the same person asking about this on the Kraken forums?
There are two styles of buddy icon requests -- one is effectively "ask
me for my buddy icon" and the other is server stored. Both of these
methods require the requester to know a little bit about the icon
before asking for it. Take a look at: http://iserverd.khstu.ru/oscar/ssbi_sequence.html
Specifically the bottom part. You have to know the icon id, md5
hash, Now granted I don't think I've ever seen the icon id be
anything other than "1", but you still need to know the md5 hash. You
get that md6 hash by receiving the target user's extended status ---
it'll include like... "away" and "my icon is this hash id" and "the
music I'm playing right now is ...". I've never seen an example of a
client able to magically request the buddy icon of an offline user.
The only times I've seen an icon for an offline user is when that
client has already seen the icon while they were online, and cached
it. =/

None-the-less, maybe someone else here knows something I don't =)