Part 5 of a five-part email deliverability playbook.
BIMI is the standard that puts your logo next to your messages in the inbox. And the dirty secret of BIMI is that the email part of it, the part with actual technical difficulty, isn’t BIMI at all. It’s DMARC at enforcement. Quarantine or reject, no shortcuts, because the entire premise of showing your logo is that your domain can’t be trivially spoofed.
If your DMARC is already enforcing, congratulations: you’ve eaten the vegetables. What’s left is mostly paperwork.
The free tier: a record and a logo
- An SVG of your logo. Specifically SVG Tiny PS, a strict profile (no scripts, no external references, square aspect ratio). Most design tools won’t export it perfectly on the first try; there are free validators and converters that get you there.
- One DNS record:
default._bimi.yourdomain.com TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://yourdomain.com/logo.svg"
That’s it. Yahoo and some other providers will start showing your logo on this alone.
The paid tier: Gmail wants receipts
Gmail requires a Verified Mark Certificate, a certificate from DigiCert or Entrust attesting that the logo is really yours. The classic VMC requires a registered trademark on the logo and runs roughly $1,000-1,500 a year. There’s a newer Common Mark Certificate that skips the trademark requirement (you prove longstanding use of the logo instead), runs cheaper, but doesn’t unlock the blue verified checkmark. Just the logo.
Whether that’s worth it is a brand question, not a technical one. A B2C sender living in Gmail inboxes gets real visual differentiation from it. A hundred-person B2B company can reasonably publish the free record, take the logo where it shows, and skip the certificate without losing sleep.
The honest framing
BIMI does nothing for deliverability. Your mail doesn’t route differently with a logo on it. What it buys is recognition and a small trust signal in a crowded inbox. And for phishing-prone brands, one more thing an impersonator can’t replicate.
But here’s the part I actually care about: the requirement did its job on you already. DMARC at enforcement is the real win. The logo is the trophy. You qualified. Whether you pick up the trophy is up to you.