BIMI

Your logo in the inbox, as a reward for finishing your authentication homework.

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a standard for displaying a brand's verified logo beside its messages in supporting inboxes such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail. It is less a feature than a reward: providers show the logo only for senders who have completed strict email authentication.

Why it matters

The visible payoff is recognition, and a harder target for phishers: a spoofed message carries no logo, and a reader who is used to seeing one has a reason to hesitate. The structural payoff is that BIMI forces DMARC to enforcement. A p=none policy does not qualify, so pursuing the logo drags a domain's authentication to where it should have been anyway. Mailbox providers designed the incentive deliberately.

In practice

Three requirements. First, DMARC at p=quarantine or p=reject. Second, the logo as SVG Tiny PS, a deliberately restricted SVG profile that strips scripts and external references. Third, for Gmail and Apple Mail, a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC): a certificate from an approved CA attesting that you own the logo, which generally requires a registered trademark and a yearly fee. Then one DNS record ties it together:

default._bimi.example.com  TXT  "v=BIMI1; l=https://example.com/logo.svg; a=https://example.com/vmc.pem"

The l= tag points to the logo, a= to the certificate. Yahoo displays logos with a VMC; Gmail and Apple require one.

How Email Fast handles it

Email Fast has the BIMI provisioning path built in: record generation, SVG Tiny PS validation, and hosting for the logo and certificate files. It arms once you hold a purchased VMC, because the certificate is the one piece only a CA can sell you. The prerequisite work, DMARC at enforcement, is part of standard domain setup.