A Detailed Guide to Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)
Here is your ultimate guide to getting your BIMI record and BIMI logo ready!
What is BIMI?
BIMI, or Brand Indicators for Message Identification is a new email authentication standard that affixes your exclusive brand logo to all the emails you send out via your brand’s email domain. You may be wondering that as the recipient of the email your email client is already showing brand logos. But what’s important is who is in control of the logos!
Usually, logos are automatically curated by email client vendors, pulling them from various sources. Different logos show up depending on different email clients and devices.
With BIMI, domain owners and brands are in control of their official displayed logos, that is maintained consistently in all inbound emails. The brand logo is the most essential identifying factor of your brand, therefore affixing the logo on every email received by your clients, partners and employees builds up a sense of trust and assurance.
It instantly captures the receiver’s attention, makes a strong first impression, is the foundation of your brand’s identity, enhances security, demarcates you from your competitors, and fosters brand loyalty.
How does BIMI work?
In order to implement BIMI, you first need to enforce your existing DMARC policy by setting it to either reject or quarantine.
After successfully enforcing DMARC you can avail of the advantages of BIMI in your organization’s email domain! Similar to any other email authentication standard, BIMI resides in your domain as a text (TXT) record.
The BIMI record(s) resides in the “_bimi” space of your DNS with the default BIMI record being “default._bimi”. The text part holds the identifier of the record version (v=BIMI1), URL to the logo (l=), and URL to the logo certificate (VMC) if available (a=).
A complete BIMI record would look like the following:
default._bimi IN TXT “v=BIMI1;l=https://url.to/your.file.svg;a=https://url.to/certificate.pem”
