BIMI SVG Validator

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) puts your brand logo next to your emails in Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, and Fastmail. It is one of the few visual trust signals you control inside the inbox, and it only works if your logo file passes a deliberately narrow technical specification. Most brand logos fail on the first attempt. Paste or upload your SVG above and this validator checks it against every BIMI requirement instantly, so you find the problems before you publish the file and change DNS.

What BIMI requires before your logo can appear

BIMI is the last step of email authentication, not the first. Before any inbox renders your logo, your domain needs a valid SPF record, working DKIM signing, and a DMARC policy set to p=quarantine or p=reject with full coverage. A policy of p=none disqualifies you no matter how good the logo file is. You then publish a TXT record at default._bimi.yourdomain.com that points to an HTTPS-hosted SVG, and optionally to a Verified Mark Certificate. You can confirm what is currently published with our BIMI record lookup. If the authentication is not in place yet, Sequenzy configures and monitors SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your sending domain as part of deliverability. Authentication support is also one of the criteria in our email marketing software comparison, if you are still choosing where to send from.

SVG Tiny PS rules your logo must follow

BIMI does not accept ordinary SVG. It requires the SVG Tiny Portable/Secure profile, a restricted subset designed so mail clients can render untrusted artwork safely. In practice that means the root element must declare baseProfile of tiny-ps and version 1.2, the file must contain a title element naming the brand, and the viewBox must be square with equal width and height. The file must contain no script elements, no animation, no external references, no embedded raster images, and no style element or external CSS. Total size must stay under 32 KB. A solid background is strongly recommended too, because a transparent logo can disappear entirely against a dark inbox theme.

Common BIMI validation errors and how to fix them

Four failures account for most rejections, and all four are fixable in a vector editor. A non-square viewBox is the most common: crop or pad the artwork until width and height match, for example a viewBox of 0 0 100 100. A missing baseProfile attribute happens because no mainstream design tool writes it, so add it to the svg element by hand. Text elements fail because font rendering is not guaranteed inside a mail client, so convert every text layer to outlines before exporting. Oversized files are usually caused by excessive path precision or leftover editor metadata, so run the file through an SVG optimizer and strip the editor namespace attributes. Re-run this validator after each change until every check passes.

Do you need a VMC certificate?

It depends on where your subscribers read their email. Gmail requires a Verified Mark Certificate or a Common Mark Certificate issued by DigiCert or Entrust, which in turn requires a registered trademark and costs roughly 1,000 to 1,500 US dollars per year. Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, and Fastmail display BIMI logos without one. Publishing BIMI with no certificate is therefore still worth doing: you get your logo in several major inboxes for the price of a DNS record, and you can add the certificate later by appending an a= tag to the same record without touching the SVG at all.