BIMI — Put Your Logo in the Inbox

You've built the authentication foundation — SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Now we get to a genuinely exciting payoff: BIMI, the standard that lets your logo appear next to your email in the inbox.

This Week’s Lesson

BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. It's a DNS record that links your verified brand logo to your email, so recipients see your logo thumbnail instead of a generic avatar.

Gmail, Apple Mail, and Yahoo all support BIMI. When configured correctly, your brand mark appears prominently in the inbox — increasing recognition, trust, and open rates.

BIMI has strict prerequisites: you must have DMARC at p=quarantine or p=reject, and (for Gmail) you need a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) — a paid certificate from a recognized authority like DigiCert or Entrust that proves your trademark ownership.

The logo itself must be in SVG format, following the SVG Tiny P/S profile. It must be a registered trademark. The DNS record looks like: default._bimi.yourcompany.com TXT 'v=BIMI1; l=https://yourcompany.com/logo.svg; a=https://yourcompany.com/vmcert.pem'

Not every organization needs BIMI immediately — but it's a powerful goal to work toward because it creates a visible trust signal for every email you send.