BIMI Record – What is it? How Does it Add to DMARC?

Brand Indicator Message Identification (BIMI) is an industry-wide standards effort to use brand logos as indicators to help email recipients recognize and avoid fraudulent messages. This standard is still currently in beta with only several brands from Oath (Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) testing this concept in front of their mailbox users.

If this standard comes to full fruition, it should be a win-win for both businesses who send email and all individual users of email. Email users will have a robust means to visually identify phishing/spam emails posing as businesses upon their arrival to the email inbox and businesses will have the added benefits of:

  • Their brand images prominently displayed in their audience’s inboxes bringing positive attention to the brand at near zero cost
  • Improved delivery rates via the adoption of DMARC and reduced spam classifications

How BIMI Records Work

A fairly recent improvement, most of today’s email shows your brand’s initials in the customers’ inboxes (e.g., R signals Redbox, DT means Discount Tire). This helps current and potential clients identify and trust messages received by these recognizable companies. With BIMI records, that trust factor significantly increases because an actual logo is used in place of mere initials. By publishing a DNS Record, the inbox provider automatically integrates your brand into every email sent from your domain (e.g., Best Buy logo displayed instead of BB).  This allows message recipients to recognize and have confidence in clicking the message in question.

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Note: This is an example.  Google will be beta testing BIMI in 2020.

Requirements of BIMI Records

Using BIMI requires ensuring DMARC authentication is set up on the domain. In fact, the BIMI concept is viewed as an extension of DMARC. Both protocols are highly beneficial to ensuring a domain’s messages are delivered and to help crack down on phishing and spoofing attempts. If you haven’t setup DMARC yet, you can learn about more of the benefits here. If you already have setup DMARC (great job!) keep checking back with us, as we’ll let you know when this beta concept gets rolled out to everyone.

Steps to Publish BIMI Records

After getting DMARC setup and ensuring it’s running smoothly for your domain, integrating the added bonus of BIMI looks to be as simple as creating a BIMI Record, a type of TXT DNS Record. We will post the full details when the standard gets out of beta.

MxToolbox is currently monitoring BIMI records in beta for the purposes of helping customers adopt technology if this development is proven beneficial for our users.

If there has been something holding you back from implementing DMARC our Delivery Center tool will put your company on the right path to enabling and enforcing DMARC. If you have already setup DMARC, we recommend discussing your specific situation with one of our email delivery experts to ensure your business is setup correctly and optimized for the best email delivery. You might be missing key DMARC insights or accidentally overlooking important email delivery problems. MxToolbox products have all you need to employ DMARC and increase email delivery rates for your brand. After all, your company’s reputation depends on it.