Completely switch off email address avatars to avoid masses of 404 request responses

Feature Request

I work with Debian, Plesk, Nginx and Fail2Ban. Fail2Ban overloads the server if there is too much writing to access logs happening, seems to get into a race condition on disc io. So I have found a way to configure nginx (under Plesk) such that 2xx and 3xx request responses are not written to the access log. This means that only errors are left in the logs (4xx and 5xx), which is just what I need. It also means that when inspecting the access logs, it is much much easier to see any problems.

What I have seen with Nextcloud is like this:

/index.php/apps/mail/api/avatars/url/myname%40example.com => 404 not found

I really want to avoid all avoidable 404's, so that I can monitor those which do happen and ban the offending IPs. The only thing within my power would be to match that location in Nginx and return some other code, but it would need to be a 2xx or 3xx for it to be not logged at all - and none of those tell the client that the request failed.

And I'm a bit surprised that it's happening at all, as I have the option for Gravatar and Favicon Icons deselected.

Summary

Please implement an option to suppress the looking for email-matching icons. This may be useful in some contexts, but in many they will all fail, e.g. as the emails I receive are all from people not in my private Nextcloud instance. I get a lot of emails from many different addresses, so they all end up as 404s - both from the dashboard and from the main email page. Predictably as 404's - and that's messing up my attempts to ban clients which produce too many 404s - I would have to make an extra set of jails just for Nextcloud, where the 404s are not tested )-:

Start by tracing the /index.php/apps/mail/api/avatars/url/ request path and the existing Gravatar and Favicon Icons settings in the Mail app. Determine where email-matching avatar lookups are triggered from the dashboard and main email page, then verify that the new option prevents those lookups and their resulting 404 responses.