Hop on: don’t miss the BIMI train

Last year, we published a blog post that explained the growing popularity of a new e-mail technology, the BIMI standard, and the way it offers marketers more and more unique and secure value. This area has seen a lot of progress in the meantime, and we will focus on the most important one of them in this post.

Let’s start here by recalling the most important points: e-mail messages arriving from a domain name using the BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) standard can be more easily identified by the recipient thanks to the verified logo in front of the message. You should know that Zone Webmail only displays the BIMI logo if it is covered by a Verified Mark Certificate aka VMC certificate, which is also explained below.

We think observant users have noticed that Zone Webmail has been displaying BIMI logos since October 2022, and now the web giant Google has started to follow the same procedure on their e-mail platform as well. This means that for legacy users of Google Worksuite, Gmail and G Suite, additional information will be displayed in front of BIMI verified e-mail messages, but having a VMC certificate is a prerequisite there as well.

In particular, it is worth noting that Gmail now displays a blue verification mark next to the sender’s logo, indicating that BIMI is used by the domain. When you see this mark on a message’s sender line, you can be sure that the logo and the sender’s background have been validated and certified. It is worth knowing that Gmail also displays logos for other e-mail messages, for example when a Google profile picture or a BIMI logo validated without VMC is used.

This is an exceptionally positive news, especially for those who have worked hard to implement the BIMI standard.

Looking at the e-mail messages arriving to our Zone servers, we are glad to see that the number of BIMI and VMC users has been gradually increasing recently – mainly among larger companies. Understandably, BIMI is still more of a premium-class product today, requiring more effort than, for example, simply creating a website with a certificate.

This effort has been undertaken by the owners of services such as energia.ee, Ikea.ee, wise.com, enefit.ee, paf.ee and many others. As a result, their e-mail messages can be visually distinguished more easily on Gmail. By the way – Zone.eu has been using BIMI with VMC certification since February 2022!

However, we have also noticed another trend. Many companies have stopped halfway when implementing BIMI – they have taken the necessary steps to get the logo to function, but have not ordered a VMC certificate. This, however, is the most important part of BIMI deployment, as it takes the VMC to display the authentic logo in Webmail or the blue verification mark in Gmail, to confirm that “Yes, this message indeed comes from the person it claims to be”.

Please note! On the BIMI website, you can use the following tool to check whether the domain has a BIMI certificate and whether it has also been verified with a VMC certificate: BIMI Inspector – BIMI Group.