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BIMI Explained: Getting Your Logo Into the Inbox

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) lets your logo show up next to your mail in inboxes that support it, a small trust signal that says "this really is us" once everything upstream of it is already authenticated. It's the last piece people usually reach for, and the one most likely to sit there published and doing nothing, because the record itself has no enforcement teeth of its own. It only activates once DMARC is already doing the enforcing.

Last updated: August 30, 2026

How BIMI works

A domain publishes a TXT record at default._bimi.yourdomain.com in the form v=BIMI1; l=<logo URL>; a=<certificate URL>. The l= tag points at a logo file; the optional a= tag points at a certificate that proves you're entitled to use it. A receiving mailbox looks up that record, and if your domain qualifies, fetches both files and displays the logo as the sender's avatar.

The DMARC prerequisite is not optional

This is where most BIMI setups quietly fail. Mailbox providers won't even look up the BIMI record unless your domain's DMARC policy is enforced at p=quarantine or p=reject, applied to all of your mail (pct=100). A policy sitting at p=none, the safe monitoring-only default most domains start with, makes your BIMI record invisible, published correctly, resolving fine, and doing nothing. If you haven't moved off p=none yet, that's the actual first step here, not the BIMI record itself.

The logo has to be a specific kind of SVG

The l= file isn't a regular SVG. It has to validate against SVG Tiny Portable/Secure (Tiny P/S), a deliberately locked-down profile of SVG Tiny 1.2: square canvas, a solid background, a required title element, and a hard ban on anything that could execute or reach outside the file, no JavaScript, no embedded raster images, no external references, no animation, no text elements. A straight export from Illustrator or Figma will almost always fail this, since design tools tend to leave in exactly the kind of metadata and structure the profile forbids. It needs to be built or cleaned specifically for this.

VMC, CMC, or neither

The a= tag is optional at the protocol level, but in practice it's what determines whether anyone actually sees your logo. There are three paths:

• No certificate. Yahoo Mail is currently the only major provider that will display a self-asserted BIMI logo with nothing backing it. Gmail, Apple Mail, and everyone else ignore an a=-less record.
• Common Mark Certificate (CMC). No registered trademark required, the certificate authority instead verifies your logo has been in continuous public use on your domain for 12 months. It unlocks Gmail's brand avatar, but not the verified checkmark, and Apple Mail doesn't recognize it at all.
• Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). Requires a trademark registered with a recognized IP office (the USPTO, EUIPO, and similar), runs roughly $749 to $1,750 a year, and takes two to four weeks to issue. It's what gets you Gmail's blue checkmark and Apple Mail support.

Microsoft/Outlook hadn't adopted BIMI at all as of mid-2026, so no certificate path gets you a logo there yet.

Setting it up

1. Enforce DMARC at p=quarantine or p=reject, pct=100, before anything else here matters.
2. Build the logo as a validated SVG Tiny P/S file, square, under the size limit, with the required background and title.
3. Decide on a certificate, a VMC, a CMC, or neither, based on which inboxes you actually need to reach and whether you hold a trademark.
4. Host the logo (and certificate, if any) over HTTPS somewhere publicly fetchable.
5. Publish the v=BIMI1 TXT record at default._bimi.yourdomain.com.
6. Confirm it resolves, then wait, there's no submission step, supporting inboxes just start picking it up on their own schedule.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• IETF Internet-Draft: Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)