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Your company logo beside the mail you send (BIMI)

What is free, what must be paid and to whom, and the real conditions for a Vietnamese business.

Short answer

BIMI is a DNS record pointing at your company logo, so recipients' inboxes draw it next to your name instead of initials. The record is free and you can add it yourself. But Gmail and Yahoo only draw the logo when the record also carries a certificate issued by an international authority — that certificate costs money, and no email provider can issue it or waive its cost.

What the free part gets you

BIMI requires the domain to have DMARC at enforcement. On vne.email the DMARC record we prepare for you is already at that level, so the hardest step is done before you start. Once the BIMI record is added, your logo shows in:

  • your own company's inboxes — staff see the company logo beside every internal message;
  • the inboxes of every other vne.email customer.
Not Gmail. We spell this out because it is the easiest thing to misread: a BIMI record without a certificate is still valid, Gmail and Yahoo simply ignore it.

What Gmail and Yahoo additionally require

They only draw the logo when the BIMI record also references a mark certificate. There are two kinds:

  • VMC (Verified Mark Certificate) — requires a trademark registered with one of the accepted intellectual-property offices. This one also earns a tick beside the logo in Gmail.
  • CMC (Common Mark Certificate) — no registered trademark needed, but the logo must have been publicly used on your own domain for at least 12 months (the issuer checks web archives). Gmail and Yahoo draw the logo, without a tick.

The real conditions for a Vietnamese business

Vietnam's intellectual-property office is not currently among the trademark offices accepted for a VMC. So if your trademark is registered only in Vietnam, the VMC and Gmail's blue tick are effectively out of reach regardless of budget. The realistic path is a CMC, and its condition is not paperwork but time: the logo must already have been publicly on your domain for a full 12 months.

If your company holds a trademark registered in the US, EU, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, India or several other jurisdictions, the VMC remains open — what counts is where the trademark is REGISTERED, not where the company is based.

How much it costs and who is paid

The certificate is issued by a small number of international certificate authorities, vetted by people against corporate paperwork, and priced per year at roughly a thousand US dollars and up. That money goes straight to the issuer, not through vne.email — we neither issue it, resell it, nor can waive its cost. What we do is the technical half: checking the logo conforms, preparing the record, and attaching the certificate to it once you have bought one.

What form the logo must take

BIMI accepts only vector art as SVG, and it must be a simplified version made for a small round tile rather than your full logo. PNG or JPEG will not do, and there is no way to convert a raster image to vector well enough — so if all you have is an image, ask your designer for the SVG. The three requirements people trip on:

  • the artwork must be square — a wide logo with text becomes an unreadable sliver in a round tile;
  • the file must be small, under 32KB — two real marks in production: Apple at 1.1KB with a single path, Agoda at 4.4KB with ten;
  • no text, no executable code and no external links inside the file; neither example above uses a gradient.

Has anyone in Vietnam done it

Very few. Measured in August 2026 across the domains a Vietnamese inbox actually receives mail from: only Shopee and Vietnam Airlines publish a BIMI record. No major bank does. Neither do the domestic business-software platforms. Internationally PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, Booking and Apple do — and Agoda runs the certificate-free configuration described above.

How to do it

  1. Upload an SVG logo in your organisation's Settings. If your logo is currently a PNG, ask your designer for the SVG first.
  2. On the Domains page, add the BIMI record we prepare for you to wherever your domain's DNS is managed. At this point the logo already shows in your own inboxes and for every vne.email customer.
  3. Only consider a certificate if you specifically need Gmail or Yahoo. Read the conditions above before spending, especially the CMC's 12-month mark.

See also