Why do some providers cache BIMI logos?
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Your BIMI logo displays instantly instead of being fetched fresh from your DNS record every single time an email lands in someone's inbox. That's caching at work. Gmail and other major providers do this because fetching your SVG from DNS on every message load would create a massive performance bottleneck. Billions of messages arrive every day. Real-time lookups for each one would slow down the entire inbox experience.
Caching also protects against abuse. Without it, an attacker could theoretically swap your logo for a fraudulent one between when someone sent the email and when a recipient actually saw it. A cached logo locks in the version that was valid when the message first arrived.
But The downside. if you update your BIMI logo or DNS record, the change doesn't show up instantly. Most providers respect the Time to Live (TTL) value you set in your DNS record. if your TTL is 3600 seconds (one hour), cached versions expire after an hour. Some providers have their own internal caching policy that can last 24 hours or longer. This is why you shouldn't expect an updated BIMI logo to display everywhere immediately. Check how mailbox providers display BIMI logos to understand the full picture of what gets cached and where. If you're planning a logo refresh, you might also want to review how BIMI setup works to plan the timing right.
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