VMC certificate: your logo instead of a grey circle

Gmail, Apple Mail and Yahoo render BIMI logos, and smaller providers such as Fastmail and Zoho support the standard as well. Gmail goes one step further and adds a blue verified badge next to the sender name, which is the part recipients notice most. Outlook and Microsoft 365 do not display BIMI logos as of July 2026, and Microsoft has said it has no short-term plans to add support. In practice that means you should look at your own recipient list before buying: if most of your customers read mail in Gmail or on Apple devices, the logo will be visible to the majority, while corporate audiences living in Outlook will simply see no change.

Yes, and there is no way around it. The whole point of a VMC is that a certificate authority confirms the logo is a trademark you actually own, so without a registration there is nothing to verify. The mark must be registered at one of eight accepted offices: the USPTO, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, EUIPO, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the German DPMA, the Japan Trademark Office, the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office, or IP Australia. A registration anywhere else does not count. This requirement stops most applicants, so check it first. If you are unsure whether your registration qualifies, write to support and we will check it before any money changes hands.

A national registration at the Latvian Patent Office is not on the accepted list, so on its own it will not get you a VMC. Companies in Latvia normally solve this with an EU trademark at EUIPO, which covers Latvia together with every other EU country and is one of the eight accepted registries. If you already hold an EUIPO registration for the exact logo you send mail with, you are fine. If you only have the national mark, the EU registration is the first step, and it takes months, so start there and treat the certificate as the final stage. We can look at your current registrations and tell you honestly where you stand before you commit to anything.

A single year is 1578.07 EUR. Two years work out at 1499.16 EUR a year, 2998.32 EUR for the term, and three years at 1446.56 EUR a year, 4339.69 EUR for the term. All prices exclude VAT. The longer terms cost less per year and also mean you go through the validation round less often. A VMC really is in a different price class from an SSL certificate, so before you compare terms, make sure you qualify at all: without a trademark registered at an accepted office, no budget can buy you a VMC. We check your trademark and your DMARC before anything is paid, so nothing is spent on an application that cannot succeed.

Validation itself runs 3 to 7 working days once your documents are in. That window includes the notarised copies of identity documents and the video call with the certificate authority, so the speed partly depends on how quickly you can get the notarised paperwork done on your side. The certificate is rarely the slow part, though. If your DMARC policy is still on p=none, moving it to quarantine or reject safely takes time, and if the trademark is not registered yet, that process is measured in months. Plan the project in that order: trademark first, then DMARC, then the certificate. Write to us early and we will tell you which of the three will actually set your timeline.

A VMC covers a logo that is a registered trademark, verified against one of the accepted trademark registries. A CMC, a Common Mark Certificate, was introduced for logos that are not trademarked, for example a mark that has been in public use for over a year. The catch is support: fewer mailbox providers render a CMC, so the reach of your logo is smaller and harder to predict. If you hold a registered trademark, the choice is simple, take the VMC, because it works everywhere BIMI works. If you do not hold one, weigh the cost of registering a trademark against the more limited coverage of a CMC, and ask us if you are unsure which path fits.

On mail sent from the domain covered by the BIMI record, and passing DMARC, yes, in the clients that support BIMI. The logo is tied to authentication, so any message that fails SPF, DKIM or DMARC simply falls back to the grey circle. The common surprise is third-party sending: newsletter platforms, CRM systems and other tools send mail on your behalf, and each of them must authenticate correctly for your domain, or their messages will show no logo. Check those integrations before you buy, because fixing them afterwards is the same work in a worse order. Once the record, the certificate and authentication all line up, the logo appears on qualifying mail automatically, with no per-message work on your side.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the protective half of email authentication: they keep forged mail out of inboxes, but nobody sees them working. A VMC is the visible half. It turns that invisible work into something a recipient can notice, your logo in place of the grey circle and, in Gmail, a blue verified badge next to your name. Whether that is worth the money depends on your mail: if you send high volumes of order confirmations or newsletters, the visible mark builds recognition on every message, and it is the only part of email authentication your marketing team can point at. If you have already done DMARC properly, the hardest technical work is behind you.