BIMI In Gmail And Subaddressing in Microsoft 365

Did you know that Google will launch support for BIMI in Gmail? How about Microsoft 365 adding support for subaddressing (a.k.a custom email addressing) to its email services?

“The simple truth is that email is how modern business (and any other kind of business) is done. ” – Neil Patel

In this article, we’ll cover the following email industry news:

1. Google launches support for BIMI in Gmail
2. Microsoft will support subaddressing in Microsoft 365 email services

Let’s dive in.

Big News From Gmail And BIMI

Email marketers are on a constant search for that one trick that will give them better visibility in front of subscribers and get their messages open. The bad news: no such solution exists – despite what many vendors may tell you. The good news: the relatively new standard – Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) – will certainly help your brand stand out in the inbox. It will not only support your visibility, but it’s also designed to prevent fraudulent emails and aid deliverability.

Currently, the list of companies who’ve implemented BIMI includes SendGrid, LinkedIn, Validity, Valimail, Verizon Media and – as of June 2019 – Google. However, considering Gmail is the most widely used email client, the company decided it’s time to fully launch the BIMI standard in Gmail.

According to the company, the BIMI standard pilot will enable brands (who have authenticated their emails by utilising Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance – DMARC), to verify ownership of their brand logo(s) and securely pass them on to Google. The instance the authenticated emails pass all of Google’s additional anti-abuse checks, Gmail will begin displaying the brand’s logo in the designated avatar slot in Gmail’s user interface (UI). Furthermore, the company confirmed, “there will be two certification authorities that will validate logo ownership – Entrust Datacard and DigiCert”. Google is also encouraging businesses to start preparing for the post-launch of the standard by adopting DMARC.

If everything goes smoothly with the pilot of the standard in Gmail, the company will make this functionality generally available in the upcoming months. In addition, adding this relatively new security standard to Gmail will go a long way to permanently removing the threat of billions of phishing emails.

Microsoft 365 Adds A Subaddressing Standard To Its Email Services

Microsoft will introduce support for custom email addressing to Microsoft 365 email services. According to the company’s roadmap, the feature is expected to be fully released in Q3 2020.

For those of you unfamiliar with custom email addressing, this is a feature which can be provided by some email clients enabling users to extend their email address through the ‘+’ symbol or ‘tags’. According to the RFC 5233 internet standard, this is also known as subaddressing.

For example, if your email address is username@domain.com you can use the + addressing feature to extend your email address to username+tag@domain.com. If your email address supports subaddressing, every email sent to the latter email address will arrive in your main inbox – i.e. username@domain.com.

The tags can be unique (+netflix, +amazon, +ebay, etc.) which will allow users to generate an infinite number of custom email addresses which can consequently be used for newsletter sign-ups, contact forms, other online forms, etc.

However, despite all the benefits in helping a user track how their email got shared online, subaddressing is not widely supported across email providers. For example, Google has supported subaddressing pretty much since its beginning, yet Yahoo, AOL and most of the other email clients do not.

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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/i4445n/bimi_in_gmail_and_subaddressing_in_microsoft_365/