Brand Authentication | Brand Indicators for Message Identification

BIMI Brand Impressions and Conversion

Fortra's Agari supports the emerging Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard by providing a visual indicator of a trusted message and helps reinforce brand recognition.

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The Challenge

Lack of consumer confidence in email communications can have an adverse effect on the efficacy of email communications. Even if your brand has been free from attacks, engagement can drop because of the perceived dangers of email phishing. Part of the problem is that customers and partners lack a convenient way to verify that an email is safe and can be trusted.

The Agari Solution

BIMI demonstrates to customers your commitment to protecting them from email-based cyber attacks. It provides a visual indication from the inbox that your email message has been authenticated and is safe to open and click. Using this standard, email messages stand out as trustworthy, making customers and partners more ready to engage.

Benefits of BIMI

Consumer Brand Recognition

After nearly five decades in service, email is still a ubiquitous digital communication platform and ranks among the top ROI-producing channels for marketing.

BIMI provides organizations an elegant way to tap into a huge opportunity to reinforce brand recognition with every email message delivered to customers, partners and other business associates.

Visual Verification of Trust

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) places a verified and approved logo next to the sender From address in the inbox.

Since the logo goes through the same verification process as a secured website, it provides a convenient visual indication that the message has been authenticated from the sending domain.

DMARC-Based Standard

The BIMI record is a type of DNS Resource Record (DNS RR), which makes it easy to deploy and manage in much the same manner as a MX, DKIM, or DMARC record.

Because it builds on the DMARC standard, BIMI offers organizations additional ROI from their investment in email authentication.

Discover the Emerging BIMI Standard

Place your approved logo on every email, ensuring customer trust and increasing revenue across digital marketing channels.

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Resources

What is DMARC?

DMARC is the only solution that enables Internet-scale email protection and prevents fraudulent use of legitimate brands for email cyberattacks.

Learn more >

What is SPF?

SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is an email authentication protocol you can use to authenticate your email. SPF is in widespread use.
 

Learn more >

What is DKIM?

DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is a standards-based way for authorized senders to digitally sign the email message.
 

Learn more >

BIMI FAQ

BIMI is a standardized way for brands to publish their brand logo online. It lets the logos be easily incorporated into messaging and social media applications. BIMI does this with built-in protections that safeguard the brand, application providers, and consumers from impersonation attempts.

With BIMI, email applications display the sending company’s brand logo alongside authenticated emails in the inbox list and within emails themselves. BIMI-sourced logos appear on screen real estate controlled by the email program, not by the email. When coupled with email authentication, it provides greater visibility, reliability and trust, which are benefits to both marketing and security.

BIMI logos aren’t just for email. They can be incorporated into any internet-based communications service including social media apps, online services, messaging services and more. It is being developed as an open standard available to any company wishing to implement it, without licensing fees.

 Brand Indicators for Message Identification builds on the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) standard for authenticating email. Before sending an email to a user’s inbox, email platforms like Outlook, Yahoo, Outlook and Gmail already check the email against the sender’s DMARC record to confirm authenticity. For domain owners with strict DMARC policies, the email platforms will reject or quarantine unauthenticated emails instead of delivering them.

Email platforms (also known as email receivers) like Yahoo will display BIMI logos only for senders whose internet domains have implemented DMARC reject or quarantine policies. Domain owners will need to add BIMI instructions to their DNS (Domain Name System) records, including the URL for the location of the file containing their logo.

When the standard is complete and fully implemented, domain owners will need to use a trusted third-party authority to verify ownership of the brand and logo.

BIMI offers a powerful incentive for companies to improve their cybersecurity practices by adopting DMARC. Organizations that adopt DMARC and BIMI will gain a new opportunity to keep their brands in front of consumers, increase customer trust in their communications and protect their brands.

For companies and other organizations, it’s a way to protect their customers and their own brands. BIMI reduces the risk of their customers being defrauded through deceptive emails appearing to come from the company.

The trust a consumer places in a brand will be harder for other actors to take advantage of by impersonating the brand, and this ultimately will increase trust in the brand.

As use of BIMI becomes widespread, we believe people will start expecting and trusting brand logos in messages and other communications.

No, BIMI can be incorporated into any internet-based communications service for mobile and web applications, including social media apps, online services, messaging services and more. Companies we expect to soon participate in the pilot include those providing fund transfers, document and data sharing, and digital transaction management. These companies offer their services through a range of applications and platforms.

In the social media context, such as where Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter allow brands to establish and manage their own pages, BIMI provides a way for brands and social media companies to coordinate display of the correct and current logo media. In addition, BIMI-based publishing assurances provide application developers with safeguards against impersonation attempts by others.