What is BIMI?
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an emerging email specification that enables organizations to lock a brand-controlled logo to an email domain and have it appear on supporting email clients. BIMI not only enables organizations to display logos with their emails, but also adds an important element of trust for these logos and keeps brands in control.
BIMI builds on DMARC. In order to show the brand’s logo as part of BIMI, the associated domains must first be authenticated by DMARC to ensure their legitimacy. By leveraging the organization’s investment in DMARC, BIMI helps grow the value of the brand both from improved visibility and a cybersecurity standpoint.
As the legitimate brand logo becomes more recognizable and establishes trust among the various audiences, two areas are potentially improved. First, the engagement with the emails can increase. Second, the likelihood of successful brand impersonation and email-borne attacks such as phishing or business email compromise (BEC) will decrease.
BIMI’s end goal is to increase the security and trust of an open, standards-based email ecosystem by building upon the adoption of DMARC on a global scale. As more organizations adopt BIMI, it will improve the way our inboxes look, ultimately helping to create a cybersecurity culture in which end users can more easily spot fraudulent activity.