Gmail is planning to add authentication logos to your email soon

Google joined Brand Indicators for Message Identification or BIMI last year in a bid to develop technology to prevent email fraud. Now, the company is planning to introduce a new feature called authentication logos in GSuite that would add brand logos to verified emails.

As of now, when you get an email from a company, say Amazon about the delivery of a product or RedBus confirming your bus journey, the email that you see in your mailbox generally contains the initials of the company’s name. When Google rolls out the authentication logos feature in Gmail for GSuite, companies will be able to authenticate themselves or in other words verify their identities to the receiver of the email using their brand logos in emails. This in turn would help people receiving the emails the sender is exactly who they claim they are.

Google said that as a part of the pilot program, organisations that authenticate their emails using DMARC will be able to validate ownership of their corporate logos and securely transmit them to Google. “Once these authenticated emails pass all of our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in existing avatar slots in the Gmail UI,” Google wrote in a blog post.

Google said that it will start the BIMI pilot in Gmail in the coming weeks with a limited number of senders and with two Certification Authorities to validate logo ownership, which includes Entrust Datacard and DigiCert. The company will make this feature to all in the coming months, at which point organisations will be able choose if they want to adopt this standard.