Sender picture (BIMI)

A sender picture is a logo that some mail apps can show next to your messages in the inbox. The standard behind it is BIMI. You upload the picture in the dashboard, and MessagePipe gives you the DNS record to publish for each sender domain.

What you need

1. An SVG file in the BIMI format (SVG Tiny-PS): square, with a title, up to 32 KB. Ask your designer for an "SVG Tiny-PS" export, or see the rules below.
2. DMARC set to quarantine or reject for the domain you send from, applied to all of your mail.
3. A VMC or CMC certificate if you want Gmail or Apple Mail to show the picture. They require one. Some other apps, such as Yahoo, can show it without one. You get a certificate from a certificate authority; it is a .pem file that you publish at an https address.
4. A DNS record at your DNS provider. MessagePipe shows you the exact record. It does not publish it for you yet.

Upload the picture

• For one brand: open the brand (Audience, Brands), choose Edit brand, and find Sender picture (BIMI).
• For a whole project: open the project, then Settings, and find Default sender picture. It is used by your managed-email domains and by the domains of brands that have no picture of their own. A brand's own picture always wins for its domains.

Choose Upload SVG. If the file cannot be accepted, the message says what is wrong and on which line.

Which SVG files are rejected

BIMI pictures must be safe to show, so we accept only a small, plain subset of SVG. A file is rejected if it contains:

• a DOCTYPE, entities, CDATA or processing instructions (delete the <!DOCTYPE ...> line);
• scripts, onclick/onload style attributes, links (<a>), <foreignObject>, <use> or animation;
• pictures or fonts from elsewhere (<image>, <text>, <style>, data: addresses, or any address that is not a #reference to something in the same file). Convert text to outlines, and export with presentation attributes rather than CSS classes;
• anything other than version="1.2" and baseProfile="tiny-ps" on <svg>, a viewBox that is not square, or no <title>.

Publish the record

Under the picture you will see each sender domain with a record like this:

Copy it into your DNS provider. The a= part appears when you add your certificate address in the same place (Certificate address). We store that address and put it in the record; we never open it.

The list next to each record shows what is ready and what is not: the picture, DMARC, the certificate and the record. DMARC is taken from the last DNS check of the domain. We do not yet check that you published the record.

Change or remove the picture

Replace picture gives the new picture a new address, so update the record's l=. The previous three addresses keep working so you have time to do that; older ones stop. If you have a certificate, it was issued for one exact picture: update the certificate address when you change the picture.

Remove deletes the picture and every earlier version for good, and their addresses stop working immediately. Mail apps that already cached the picture may keep showing it for a while, and we cannot recall those copies. Your DNS record still points at the old address until you delete the record yourself, so remove it at your DNS provider too.