BIMI makes your e-mails more secure and visible

What is BIMI? BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) is an innovative e-mail technology growing in popularity that brings about unprecedented consistency between corporate marketing and cybersecurity.

Namely, using the BIMI standard makes your e-mails stand out in the general mass of messages by marking the e-mails with the sender’s brand logo, and simultaneously mitigates the risk of attacks performed via e-mail, such as phishing attacks against your customers or identity thefts of managers/employees.

As this is still a very new standard, BIMI logos are currently displayed mainly in the environments of globally significant e-mail service providers like Apple, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Now, Zone Webmail has joined the list of these environments as well as can be seen from the list of approved service providers on the official BIMI website.

Seeing the brand logo displayed in the inbox increases the recipient’s interest in the sender of the e-mail, giving the sender an advantage in e-mail marketing. According to the Red Sift survey carried out in 2021, the use of BIMI increased the e-mail open rate by 38% and trust by up to 90%.

The main goal of BIMI is, however, increasing the trustworthiness of e-mail in a world where the number of phishing e-mails and people falling victim to them continues to rise. BIMI can only be used by domains who have implemented the SPF, DKIM and DMARC technologies, which in turn make it possible to verify the authenticity of the source mail server.

BIMI and Zone Webmail

While many e-mail environments and applications try to display logos originating from unvalidated sources next to e-mails (making implementation easier but increasing cybersecurity risks), we have chosen a safer and more secure path for implementing the BIMI standard in the Zone Webmail environment.

In Zone Webmail, the sender needs to perform the following steps to see their logo next to the e-mails sent from their domain:

• have valid SPF, DKIM and DMARC records set up for their domain,
• configure their DMARC policy to quarantine (p=quarantine) or reject (p=reject) all nonconforming messages,
• register their company logo with EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office),
• request a VMC (Verified Mark Certificates) certificate.

Based on our experience so far, we can say that while meeting these requirements is a time-consuming task, the result is well worth the effort and will significantly increase your company’s visibility and trustworthiness.

We’ve learned many important and exciting things in the course of this process, and for this reason we also want to share our experiences with other people interested in the subject. Feel free to ask for a quotation and advice on implementing BIMI from sales@zone.ee!