Avatar/Gravatar – How do I get around this?

For about 6 months now I have been unable to generate new Gravatars for email addresses on gravatar.com. It won’t recognize any email address from my server and authorizations I send to gmail addresses never verify back into my gravatar account.

At this point, I believe there is something wrong with gravatar all together and would like to just use a different method for adding avatars images to user accounts on self-hosted wordpress sites.

Can anyone suggest anything that works for them?