BENEFITS of bimi
Do I need BIMI?
Why BIMI?
Over the years the avatars displayed in mailboxes became a standard user interface element but their source was never standardized. While some email clients had the logos predefined by the authors of the email client, others have relied heavily on data from social networks, favicons on corresponding websites or gravatars. That made it very difficult for brand marketers to control how their logo is displayed.
BIMI gives back the control over the logo display to brand marketers.
What is BIMI?
BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification - a new industry standard effort to unify the use of brand logos across all email platforms. It allows brands to control the display of their logo in the email clients and put their brand in front of receivers before they open the email. It builds on the existing email authentication standards to provide improved user experience. It incentivises brands to deploy DMARC email authentication which is required for BIMI to work.
Still have a questions?
Who will display the BIMI logo?
Having setup your BIMI record doesn’t guarantee your logo will be displayed. The display is conditional and is based on proper email authentication using DMARC and your reputation as a sender. The BIMI logo display is currently supported at Yahoo! and Fastmail. Gmail supports BIMI and requires Verified Mark Cerificate. Other mailbox providers have stated their interest in supporting BIMI standard including Comcast, 1&1 and Seznam. Android users can see BIMI logos in FairEmail client.
More news about the BIMI standard and it’s current progress can be found at the official BIMIgroup website.
How are brands protected?
BIMI will only work for domains that have email authentication in place and enforced using DMARC with quarantine or reject policy on organization level. To make sure the logo itself is not spoofed the BIMI standard supports Verified Mark Certificates (VMC). Display of the BIMI logo is up to the receiving party's discretion and Gmail requires VMC to be present.
How to get started with BIMI?
BIMI lives in a DNS record of your domain and as such is fully in control of the domain owner (brand). To setup your BIMI you will need to have a square SVG image file with your logo. The SVG must contain only vectorized graphics with no bitmap data and no external references. The SVG file is then referenced in a URL from the DNS text record.