Valimail Delivers Industry’s First Fully Automated Solution for Email Branding With Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

By STS News Desk On Jul 30, 2019

New offering delivers brand impressions and increases email deliverability through the use of Google- and Verizon-backed standard — plus Microsoft Business Profiles

Valimail, the leading provider of identity-based anti-phishing solutions, announced the availability of Valimail Amplify today. Based on the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard, Amplify is a service purpose-built to display the logos of DMARC-enforced senders in the email clients of BIMI-supporting vendors.

“We’re excited to be delivering this product, after working with Google, Verizon Media, and all the other BIMI supporters to develop the standard over the past year,” said Valimail VP of Product William Stephens. “Valimail Amplify dovetails seamlessly with Google’s forthcoming BIMI pilot, as well as the Yahoo Mail BIMI trial and Microsoft Business Profile for Outlook.com. Working together, our goal is to provide incentives, standards, and products that will make email more effective and trustworthy for everyone.”

Valimail Amplify offers companies the ability to leverage BIMI with a simple, secure interface. Companies using Valimail Amplify can take control of the images and information displayed adjacent to their email messages in customer inboxes on Yahoo Mail and other email providers, such as Google, when they add BIMI support.

Additionally, Valimail Amplify is the only BIMI product that also supports Microsoft Business Profile on Outlook.com, so companies can control their BIMI assets and Microsoft profile data from a single dashboard. Microsoft Business Profile is a separate project that offers similar logo control to domain owners, but which also enables the addition of company information that can be revealed as a popup on the sender’s logo. Microsoft Business Profiles currently appear in Outlook.com inboxes, for senders that have enabled them.

BIMI provides a secure, global framework enabling email inboxes to display sender-designated logos for authenticated email messages. It includes strong protections preventing senders from spoofing logos owned by other organizations. As part of those protections, BIMI will work only with email that has been authenticated through the Domain-based Message Authentication, Receiving & Conformance (DMARC) standard and for which the domain owner has specified a DMARC policy of enforcement (reject or quarantine). Verizon Media has been conducting a BIMI trial, offering support for BIMI logos in Yahoo Mail, since 2018. Google recently joined the AuthIndicators Working Group, which oversees the development of the BIMI standard, and committed to its own BIMI pilot in 2020.

The AuthIndicators project was co-founded in 2015 by Valimail CEO Alexander García-Tobar. Valimail has been an avid supporter of BIMI since the company’s founding, and has been serving as the chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group for the past year. Other members include Comcast, Google, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media. The company views this support as an important corporate obligation, and it is just one part of its extensive open source and standards work, including contributions to DMARC 2.0, ARC, and numerous industry groups.