Showing your logo in inboxes with BIMI

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) shows your logo beside your emails in inboxes that support it, such as Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo and Fastmail. It’s a branding touch, not a deliverability setting: it won’t change whether your mail reaches the inbox, and not every inbox displays it (Outlook.com, for example, doesn’t).

BIMI is optional and advanced, and you don’t need it to send with Letterhead.

What Letterhead does and doesn’t do

All of the BIMI setup happens outside Letterhead, on your sending domain and at your DNS provider. Letterhead sends your email from your authenticated sending domain, which is what BIMI builds on; there’s nothing to turn on in Letterhead itself. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your setup, support can help.

What you need

Have all of these in place before you publish the record, or the logo won’t appear:

• Your own sending domain, set up and authenticated. See setting up your sending domain.
• DMARC at enforcement. Your domain’s DMARC record must be p=quarantine or p=reject, with pct=100. Most providers also want it at enforcement for about 30 days before they show a logo. If yours is at p=none, move to p=quarantine first and watch your reports for a couple of weeks.
• A logo in SVG Tiny-PS format. A regular SVG won’t do. The root <svg> element needs baseProfile="tiny-ps"; no scripts, external references, animation or embedded images; 32 KB or less; square, centered, on a solid background. BIMI Group (bimigroup.org) lists converters, or your designer can export one.
• A certificate, for Gmail and Apple Mail. They require a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), which needs a registered trademark, or a Common Mark Certificate (CMC), for logos that aren’t trademarked and honored by fewer providers. Both come from an authorized issuer such as DigiCert or Entrust. Yahoo and Fastmail show the logo without one.
• Somewhere to host the logo over HTTPS at a stable URL with no redirect, ideally on your own domain, for example https://yourbrand.com/bimi/logo.svg.

Publish the BIMI record

1. Sign in to your DNS provider (Cloudflare, Route 53, GoDaddy, Namecheap and so on).

2. Create a TXT record with the host or name default._bimi. Your provider adds your domain, so it resolves to default._bimi.yourdomain.com.

3. Set the value to the version and your logo’s URL:

   v=BIMI1; l=https://yourbrand.com/bimi/logo.svg

   If you have a VMC or CMC, add an a= tag pointing to it:

   v=BIMI1; l=https://yourbrand.com/bimi/logo.svg; a=https://yourbrand.com/bimi/vmc.pem

4. Save the record, then check it with a BIMI checker such as MX Toolbox’s BIMI lookup or BIMI Group’s inspector, which flag syntax, logo format and certificate problems.

Tag	Required	Purpose
v	Yes	Version. Always BIMI1.
l	Yes	HTTPS URL of your Tiny-PS logo.
a	For Gmail and Apple Mail	HTTPS URL of your VMC or CMC.

How long it takes

DNS changes usually take 24 to 48 hours. Providers cache BIMI lookups, so your logo can take several days to a few weeks longer to appear, and if you’ve only just moved DMARC to enforcement, the 30 days count from that change. Send a test to a Gmail or Yahoo address after a week or so.

If everything above is in place, the checker passes, and your logo still hasn’t appeared after 30 days at enforcement, contact support and we’ll help you look at it.

Related

• How do I set up my custom sending domain?
• Improving your deliverability