Icons on mail sender in Gmail

Question

In this little bit of screenshot from the GMail web client, you can see that the name of the sender of one message (chess.com) has a small icon associated with it (a chess piece.) It is not the favicon for the domain (although it's quite similar to it,) and I've never set up anything special on my end, nor added chess.com to any address book or other client-side database. Does anyone have any idea how this is implemented, and how it might be possible for a sender of email to include an icon like this?

Answer 1

It could simply be that the character is a character in some font.

See if you can select it like you would a character.