Do you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to somebody ends up in their spam folder? Do you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to a recipient gets wrongly bounced as “suspected spam” or gets silently discarded by the recipient’s email service provider?
There’s a chance that BIMI, which draws upon a registered trademark of the sender of an email message, might help a little with these problems. What is BIMI? What must an email sender do to get BIMI to work?
What I now realize is that BIMI is one of those trademark-adjacent things like “registering your trademark with US Customs” or “signing up for Amazon Brand Registry” that every trademark practitioner needs to know about.
What is BIMI? BIMI is an acronym (which is better than being a mere initialism). BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. There is a Wikipedia article about BIMI and you can find lots of good information about BIMI at the web site of the BIMI group.
What must an email sender do to get BIMI to work? Here is what you or your trademark client might choose do do:
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- You jump through some hoops and pay some money to get a special “certificate” that proves that your logo is your logo.
- You spend a bunch of time and energy carefully configuring your email sending system so that it sends your outbound email messages in a very special way that tells the world that your outbound email messages are authenticated by your “certificate”.
If you do all of this, then the recipient of the email message might see your logo displayed in the recipient’s email in-box next to your email message.
Because of this displayed logo, the recipient might be more inclined to think the email message is not spam.
What is this special “certificate”? To play the BIMI game, you need to get either a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) or a Common Mark Certificate (CMC).
To get a VMC, you need to already have a registered trademark from a trusted trademark office (the USPTO counts as a “trusted trademark office”). You then take your logo and render it as a so-called “BIMI SVG” image file. The image needs to “look good” at a mere 100 pixels square. You then spend money with a VMC service provider who goes to the trouble to compare the image of your BIMI SVG file with the drawing in your trademark registration certificate. If they match, then the service provider gives you the VMC.
Once you get your VMC, what else must you do? Having obtained your VMC, you then go to quite a bit of fuss and bother to make it so that your outbound email messages will get sent in a way that tells the world that your email message is tied to your VMC. This involves (among other things) setting up what is called a “DMARC record” in your system for sending email messages.
What if you don’t have a trademark registration? For those who lack a trademark registration, another option is to obtain what is called a CMC (Common Mark Certificate) instead of a VMC. To get the CMC, you must purchase the services of a CMC service provider. You must prove, to the satisfaction of the CMC service provider, that you have been using your logo for at least 12 months. (You do this by pointing to proof in the Way-Back Machine.)
It turns out that some email service providers will honor a VMC but will not honor a CMC. It seems to me that anybody who wants to play the BIMI game would be wise to go to the extra trouble to obtain a VMC.
How much money do you need to pay to the VMC or CMC service provider? The cost to get a certificate from one of the service providers is typically around $1500-$2000 for the VMC or slightly less money for the CMC. Oh, and this is an annual cost.
One service provider is Sectigo which charges $990 or more annually for a CMC and $1,350 or more annually for a VMC. Another service provider is Digicert which charges $1236 or more annually for a CMC or $1668 or more annually for a VMC.
Which email service providers do and do not honor BIMI? If your email recipient uses Google (gmail) for email, then a BIMI-compliant email message will get displayed in the recipient’s email in-box with your logo. The recipient will realize that the email message really came from you. Assuming the recipient does not think you are the sort of person who sends spam, then the recipient will realize that your email message is not spam.
Who else besides Google honors BIMI? You can see “the good, the bad, and the ugly” at this web page. The chief “ugly” is Microsoft. You or your trademark client can go to all of this trouble to set up BIMI for your outbound email messages, and Microsoft won’t do anything about it.
What needs to happen next? What needs to happen next is that people who pay money to Microsoft need to tell Microsoft that it needs to honor BIMI.
Most law firms use Microsoft to host their email, although not in a way that is very easy to see. Those law firms need to write a letter to Microsoft telling it to honor BIMI.
Do you already have experience with BIMI? Please post a comment below.