Valimail has been closely involved with the implementation and expansion of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) since it’s inception in 2019. Valimail’s Chief Technology Officer, Seth Blank, is also Chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group, who developed the BIMI standard.
Today, Google Workspace announced a huge update that builds upon BIMI in Gmail. Google Workspace users will now see a checkmark icon next to the names of senders that have adopted BIMI with VMC, elevating the protection provided by DMARC into something tangible for users worldwide.
Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) at enforcement provides the strongest form of email authentication, ensuring that messages received from an organization are really from that organization. Historically, this protection was entirely behind the scenes, stopping spoofed messages before they ever reached a user’s inbox.
BIMI is an email specification which builds on DMARC that puts you in control of how your logo appears within recipient inboxes, rather than just letting the inbox provider guess at your logo, displaying generic avatars, or just displaying the company’s initials.
With the new Gmail checkmark, users can see that the protections from DMARC and BIMI are in place. Currently, the majority of email senders won’t have a checkmark next to their names, but this release showcases the importance of strong email authentication for Google. Google’s checkmark joins Apple’s checkmark and Yahoo’s check mark for BIMI logos, meaning that a checkmark now displays next to BIMI logos in more than 2 billion inboxes.
According to Google, in order to take advantage of BIMI and this new checkmark, “ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC, issued by a Certification Authority such as Entrust or DigiCert.”
Valimail is the world leader in automated DMARC enforcement, and we partner with Digicert to help companies implement BIMI in their outgoing emails. We co-hosted a webinar on how IT and Marketing can join forces earlier this year:
Currently, this update is web only, and can be seen only on the read message view (not the inbox view), the change is an excellent step forward for anyone that has implemented DMARC and BIMI for their organization.
To check your BIMI records, and determine if your organization is ready to send mail with BIMI in place, visit our free Domain Checker tool:
For organizations considering DMARC or BIMI, the message is clear: now is the time to implement both, to get the strongest protections possible for your business, customers, and employees, and gain increased brand recognition and interaction in inboxes worldwide.
Seth Blank, Chief Technology Officer at Valimail
Valimail has been helping customers add DMARC and achieve ongoing, automated DMARC enforcement for years, and we’ve been at the forefront of adopting BIMI since its release in 2020.
If you want to get the benefits of BIMI for your organization, contact one of our DMARC experts today to learn more.