logos
Today, let’s define the acronym BIMI, aka “Brand Indicators for Message Identification.”Let’s go straight to the folks who have created the BIMI specs, the Authindicators Working Group. From their website: “Brand Indicators for Message Identification is an emerging email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients.”What? It’s a way to publish a logo that will show up next to email messages you send.Why? To increase branding, increase customer confidence that your emails are legitimate, and it can increase engagement.How? First, you must secure your domain with DMARC (and that DMARC policy must be a “strong” one, aka “quarantine” or “reject”). You must purchase a “verified mark certificate” (required by some BIMI-supporting mailbox providers, though not all) to prove that your logo is properly trademarked, and then you need to publish a version of your logo in a special limited vector graphics format. BIMI is supported by
Estonian webhost and mailbox provider Zone now supports BIMI and will display a sender logo in Zone Webmail, if they’re able to. VMC is required. Find more details here.Doing a quick check of my domain data, I think that Zone’s primary email domains are:webmail.zone.eezone.com.eezone.eezone.euzone.fizone.ltzone.lvThey also host email for more than a thousand other domains for customers; all relevant domains have an MX record pointing to zonemx.eu.
What’s an ANIBIMI? A completely fake term that I just made up! It’s not a BIMI — it’s an animated user image for a Google profile, and (at least until Google decides they don’t like this any more) it’s your way to make an animated BIMI-like logo that will display for Gmail subscribers (only).Repeat after me: This is not actually a BIMI logo! You should still implement a BIMI logo! Especially since Apple’s jumping on the BIMI bandwagon. But since a lot of people have asked about animated profile images lately, I thought I would share this fun little trick. (And keep in mind that you can set this up and use it as a potential stopgap until you get that VMC certificate and are able to fully implement BIMI.)Create an animated GIF. There are lots of tools online that’ll help you with this, like EZGif, Imgflip or Canva. Because I’m