icloud

Check it out — it’s our first taste of BIMI on iOS outside of beta. Apple iOS users who upgrade to iOS 16 can now see a BIMI logo associated with an email send, depending on what mailbox provider they use. All four of these CNN Newsletter signup emails were opened and viewed on the default Apple mail client in iOS 16.0.2, and as you can see, iCloud and Fastmail users get shown the BIMI logo for CNN! You’ll note that no logo is displayed for the Yahoo and Gmail subscribers, even though both platforms support BIMI (and CNN has the Gmail-required VMC in place). Why Fastmail and not Gmail or Yahoo? I suspect that Fastmail was quickest to implement an updated “authentication results” header that includes information about the BIMI logo checks, and I don’t think Gmail and Yahoo are including that information. Yet? It seems likely that they’ll catch

We knew that BIMI support was coming to Apple iOS and MacOS. And now, Apple has published a support page: Prepare your email server for BIMI support in Apple Mail. Reading through the guide, it sounds like support might go beyond just Apple iCloud (mac.com, me.com, icloud.com) domains, if other mailbox providers structure their headers properly. If this support is client-based and not recipient domain based, that could really make things interesting. Here’s hoping I’m reading that right.For more on Apple’s rollout of BIMI support, check out this update from the Authindicators (BIMI) Working Group.

This is all subject to change, of course. Currently, we’re only as far as the first version of the iOS 16 Public Beta, and much could be different by the time we get to the actual final (non-beta) release version of iOS, which is said to launch late in 2022. But already, BIMI logo support is indeed in there, as you can see from screenshots of this email from Zillow, as viewed on my trusty iPhone SE (2020). Never have I been so happy so see a squiggly Z before today.In my testing, I found that the logo shows only for mail sent to iCloud accounts; I tested this with Gmail as well (both in the iOS Mail application) and logos didn’t work for any non-Apple domain recipients. Will that change? I hope so; it’d be nice if this were recipient-domain agnostic, like how Apple MPP is. Also, logos don’t show

Thanks to William Gallagher from Apple Insider for letting us know that Apple has launched the ability to configure a custom email domain with iCloud Mail. It’s explicitly noted as being in beta, and it sounds like the process is a bit buggy so far, but they’ll get it worked out, and I have a feeling that this could be the start of something big. Click on through to read more.