Why do some mailboxes ignore BIMI logos?
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You've set up your BIMI record, uploaded your SVG logo, and Gmail is showing it perfectly. Then you open Outlook and there's nothing there. Here's why that happens.
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) requires three things to display your logo:
- DMARC at enforcement level (p=quarantine or p=reject, not p=none)
- A valid BIMI DNS record pointing to your SVG logo
- A Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) issued by an approved Certificate Authority
When a mailbox provider receives your email, it checks all three. If any piece is missing or misconfigured, it silently skips the logo. There's no error message, no warning in your ESP dashboard. Just no logo.
The bigger issue: not every mailbox provider supports BIMI at all. Gmail and Apple Mail show logos. Yahoo Mail has supported BIMI since 2021. Outlook (including Microsoft 365) does not, as of 2024. So if you're seeing logos in Gmail but not Outlook, that's expected behavior, not a configuration bug.
The first thing to check is your DMARC enforcement level. If you're at p=none, no BIMI-supporting provider will show your logo regardless of what else you've set up. You can check your DMARC record with our free DMARC parser.
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