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Help! I’m seeing the wrong BIMI logo at Yahoo!


So, you’ve published your DMARC logo record. Your shiny new SVG logo file looks great in testing, but no matter what you do, no logo shows up at Yahoo Mail. Or, even worse, a DIFFERENT, possibly old, logo shows up at Yahoo Mail. Don’t fret. This is all fixable! Read on to find out what to do.

Keep in mind that once upon a time (prior to BIMI), Yahoo would try to populate sender logos automatically for Yahoo Mail. There are multiple ways they’d look up a logo to be mapped to a given email address or domain name, and even used to pull logos from Google Plus accounts (I do believe), back when that was a thing. But nowadays, the BIMI specification is the law of the land when it comes to displaying a sender logo in Yahoo Mail.

If you’ve set up BIMI and it doesn’t seem to be showing up properly, I suggest following these steps:

  1. First, use the BIMI Group’s online tool to look up your BIMI record, and make sure it passes all the relevant tests there. That includes a properly formatted SVG image file (Tiny/PS variant) – and no, you can’t embed a bitmap in your image – the graphic must be vector in nature. If this online lookup tool can’t find your BIMI record; it has not been implemented properly and it will never work. (I suspect that the most common reason this happens is putting the BIMI DNS record at the wrong level of the domain, or forgetting the underscore in the DNS record.)
  2. Review the BIMI Group’s BIMI Implementation Guide to make sure you’ve got your DMARC record set up properly. Their BIMI checker should warn you if anything is configured wrong; and their implementation guide is something you’ll want to reference if you need to fix anything.
  3. Wait. How recently did you set up the DNS record? Please give it up to two weeks; we think Yahoo caches BIMI records, which strongly implies that they check for new ones only periodically.
  4. Make sure you send “enough” volume. There is no published guide as to what constitutes “enough” email volume; but my guess is that if you don’t send at least a couple hundred thousand email messages per week, you likely could be “too small” to be automatically noticed by the Yahoo Mail BIMI caching/update process.
  5. After you’ve waited for a couple of weeks, and/or you don’t send “enough” email volume, reach out to Yahoo Mail via the “contact us” link on their BIMI help page. Tell them that you’ve just implemented a BIMI logo for your new domain name, and it couldn’t hurt to let them know that you’ve checked everything on the BIMI Group website and that everything looks good for you. Let them know if you’re seeing a wrong or old sender logo in Yahoo Mail today, in case they might need to know that to flip a switch or clear an old setting.

Be patient, and don’t expect exceptions or special favors. Yahoo has indicated that they will indeed “add your domain name to the BIMI domain list” to check for and cache your BIMI logo if needed, but your mail still has to comply with all the relevant specifications regarding logo format, DMARC policy, and so forth. And of course, sender best practices still apply – bad senders should not expect to suddenly get mail delivered to the inbox just because they’ve added a BIMI logo.

Note that currently Yahoo Mail does not require a VMC (Verified Mark Certificate) for your BIMI logo. This could always change in the future; be sure to keep up to date with the current state of BIMI requirements by bookmarking the BIMI Group website and reading cool blogs like Spam Resource.

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