BIMI in 2026: How to Get Your Logo Next to Your Emails

Two campaigns land in the same Gmail inbox at the same minute. One shows a crisp circular brand logo beside the sender name. The other shows a grey circle with a single letter in it. Before either subject line is read, one sender already looks like a company and the other looks like a stranger. That difference is BIMI, and it is one of the few visual advantages in email that a competitor cannot copy by writing better copy.

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a DNS record that tells mailbox providers where to find your logo and, in most cases, a certificate proving you have the right to use it. It is not a deliverability feature. It will not rescue a bad list. What it does is convert authentication work you should be doing anyway into something a subscriber can see. The setup is genuinely straightforward once your DMARC policy is at enforcement. The certificate is where it gets expensive, and where most people stall.

What BIMI actually requires

Four things, in this order. Skip one and nothing displays.

• SPF and DKIM passing, aligned to your sending domain. BIMI sits on top of existing authentication. It reads your DMARC result and nothing else.
• DMARC at enforcement. A policy of p=quarantine or p=reject on the domain you send from. p=none disqualifies you entirely, and a partial pct value below 100 does too.
• A logo in SVG Tiny Portable/Secure format. This is a restricted SVG profile: square aspect ratio, a solid background, no scripts, no external references, no animation. Your designer’s export will almost certainly need converting.
• A certificate, for most inboxes. Gmail requires either a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) or a Common Mark Certificate (CMC). Yahoo and AOL will display a logo from the DNS record alone once your reputation is acceptable.

Where the logo actually shows up

Support is uneven, and vendors tend to describe it more generously than reality warrants.

Gmail displays the logo in the avatar slot in both the web client and the mobile apps, and it requires a certificate. A VMC additionally earns the blue verified checkmark next to the sender name. A CMC gets the logo but not the checkmark.

Apple Mail shows BIMI logos on iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS Ventura 13 and later, plus iCloud.com, through Apple’s Branded Mail program. Apple also requires a certificate.

Yahoo and AOL were the earliest adopters and remain the most permissive: they will render a logo from the BIMI DNS record without a certificate, provided your DMARC policy is at enforcement and your sending reputation is good. Fastmail and Zone also display logos without demanding a certificate.

Outlook and Microsoft 365 are the notable gap. If most of your list is on Microsoft addresses, BIMI buys you very little today.

That distribution matters for the budget conversation. If your audience skews B2B and Microsoft-heavy, a $1,400 certificate is hard to justify. If you are a consumer brand sending to Gmail and Apple Mail addresses, the maths looks very different.

Step 1: Get DMARC to enforcement

Check your current policy first:

dig +short TXT _dmarc.yourdomain.com

If the result contains p=none, you are not eligible yet. If it contains pct= with anything less than 100, that also disqualifies you: BIMI requires the policy to apply to all mail.

The target record looks like this:

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com

Quarantine is enough for BIMI. Moving to p=reject is stronger protection against spoofing but is not a BIMI requirement, so do not rush it if you are still finding stray sending sources in your reports.

Step 2: Convert your logo to SVG Tiny PS

This is the step that produces the most support tickets. The spec is narrower than normal SVG, and a file that opens fine in a browser will still be rejected.

Your file must be a square, use a solid (non-transparent) background, include a <title> element, declare the baseProfile="tiny-ps" attribute and version 1.2, and contain no scripts, no animation, no external image or font references, and no raster embedding. Keep it small: a few kilobytes is normal, and files over about 32 KB tend to cause problems.

Design for a circle even though the file is square. Gmail and Apple Mail crop to a round avatar and render it at roughly 40 pixels. A horizontal wordmark disappears at that size. Use the mark, not the full lockup, and check it at actual size before you commit: the certificate you buy later is tied to the exact image you register.

Host the file over HTTPS on a stable URL you control. A path like https://yourdomain.com/bimi/logo.svg is fine. Do not put it behind a redirect or a CDN that rewrites the URL.

Step 3: Decide between a VMC and a CMC

For years this was the wall. A Verified Mark Certificate required a logo registered as a trademark in an approved jurisdiction, which put BIMI out of reach for most small and mid-sized senders. The Common Mark Certificate changed that: instead of a trademark, it accepts evidence that you have used the logo publicly for at least 12 months.

The trade-off is the checkmark. A VMC earns the blue verified badge in Gmail alongside the logo. A CMC gets you the logo only. Whether that badge is worth several hundred dollars a year depends entirely on how much your category suffers from impersonation.

Only two certificate authorities are authorised to issue mark certificates: DigiCert and Entrust. As of mid-July 2026, DigiCert listed a starting subscription price of $1,416 per certificate per year, and Entrust’s VMC was around $1,499 per year with a CMC closer to $1,099. Resellers bring that down considerably (quoted entry prices of roughly $749 for a VMC and $649 for a CMC are common) but you are buying the same certificate from the same two issuers either way. Prices move, so confirm directly before you budget.

Budget for the paperwork too. A VMC application means supplying trademark registration numbers and passing an organisation validation check, which typically runs one to three weeks. A CMC skips the trademark evidence but still requires proof of prior use, usually archived screenshots or dated marketing material.

Step 4: Publish the BIMI record

Add a TXT record at default._bimi.yourdomain.com. Without a certificate:

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

With one, add the a= tag pointing at your PEM file:

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

The default selector is what mailbox providers look for unless a message specifies otherwise via a BIMI-Selector header. Most senders never need more than one. If you run several brands from separate subdomains, each subdomain gets its own record, its own logo, and (annoyingly) its own certificate.

Step 5: Send a test and wait

Send to a Gmail account and an iCloud account, then open the message. In Gmail, “Show original” will list a BIMI result alongside SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. A pass there means the record and certificate validated even if the avatar has not refreshed yet.

Display lags validation. Gmail caches sender avatars and can take days to swap one in, and it applies its own reputation judgement on top of the technical check: a domain with a poor complaint history can pass BIMI validation and still show nothing. Give it a week of normal sending before assuming something is broken.

Common mistakes

• Publishing BIMI while DMARC is still at p=none. The single most common failure. The record is syntactically valid, so nothing errors: it just never renders.
• Using a regular SVG export. Illustrator and Figma both produce SVG that violates the Tiny PS profile. Convert deliberately and validate.
• A wordmark instead of a mark. At 40 pixels in a circular crop, text is unreadable. This is a design decision, not a technical one, and it is made permanent by the certificate.
• Certifying the wrong domain. The certificate is issued against the exact domain in your From address. If you send marketing from news.yourdomain.com but certified the root domain, it fails.
• Assuming a certificate covers subdomains. It generally does not. Plan the domain structure before you buy.
• Expecting BIMI to fix deliverability. It is a display feature. Inbox placement still comes down to authentication, list hygiene, and complaint rates, none of which a logo touches.

Which platforms make this easier

BIMI lives in DNS, so no email platform can do it for you. What a platform controls is whether you can send from your own aligned domain at all, and how much help you get diagnosing DMARC before you spend money on a certificate.

Postmark is the strongest option on the diagnostic side. Every plan includes DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication, the Basic plan at $15 a month covers 10,000 emails and five custom sending domains, and its DMARC Digests add-on starts at $14 a month per domain and turns raw aggregate XML into a readable weekly report, which is exactly the tool you want while working toward enforcement. The catch is scope: Postmark is a transactional sending service that prohibits cold outreach and is not a marketing platform, so most senders pair it with something else rather than using it alone. See the full Postmark pricing page for the higher tiers.

Klaviyo is the natural fit on the marketing side for the consumer brands that get the most out of BIMI, since its audience sits overwhelmingly in Gmail and Apple Mail. Its free tier covers 250 active profiles, and domain authentication is available without an enterprise contract. The significant weakness is the billing model: Klaviyo charges on total active profiles rather than contacts you actually email, and it auto-upgrades your tier as the list grows without auto-downgrading after you clean it. Check current rates on the Klaviyo pricing page before committing.

Brevo is the cheaper European alternative and prices on email volume rather than contact count, which suits senders with large but infrequently-mailed lists. Its free plan allows 300 emails a day. The weakness is that the entry Starter tier caps contacts at 500 despite the low headline price, so the volume-based model gets expensive faster than the pricing page suggests once your list grows.

If inbox placement is the deciding factor rather than logo display specifically, our best deliverability tools roundup ranks platforms on that basis.

What success looks like

Three signals, in order. Your DMARC record shows p=quarantine or p=reject with no pct below 100, and your aggregate reports show only sources you recognise. A test message to Gmail shows a BIMI pass under “Show original”. And within a week or so of normal sending, your logo appears in the avatar slot in Gmail and Apple Mail.

Then it is largely maintenance. Certificates renew annually and the renewal is easy to forget: when it lapses, the logo silently disappears from Gmail while Yahoo keeps showing it, which makes the failure confusing to diagnose. Set a calendar reminder 60 days out. If you change the logo, you need a new certificate for the new file; small tweaks are not free.

The honest summary: BIMI is a modest, real, and permanent visual advantage that costs somewhere between nothing and $1,500 a year depending on which inboxes matter to you. Do the DMARC work first regardless: it protects your domain from spoofing whether or not you ever buy a certificate. Then decide whether the logo is worth the invoice. For a Gmail-heavy consumer brand, it usually is. For a Microsoft-heavy B2B sender, it usually is not, at least not yet.

Sources

1. BIMI Group — Implementation guides and validation tools — accessed 2026-08-09
2. Postmark — Pricing — accessed 2026-08-09
3. Klaviyo — Pricing — accessed 2026-08-09
4. Brevo — Pricing — accessed 2026-08-09