Sender logo

Most inboxes show a grey initial next to a message from a sender they have no picture for. A mailbox that supports BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) shows your logo instead, and a recognisable face in a list of messages is one of the few things that changes whether yours gets opened.

Every sending identity in Sendly has a logo already. Until you upload one, it is your domain's initial on a coloured square, which is what news.example.com recipients see as an "N".

What it takes

Three things, and only the first is in Sendly:

1. The file. Your upload, or the default initial. Sendly hosts it at a URL that belongs to the identity and never changes.
2. A TXT record in your DNS, naming that URL. You publish it once.
3. An enforced DMARC policy: p=quarantine or p=reject, applied to all of your mail (no pct below 100). A mailbox will not put a logo on mail from a domain whose owner has not said what to do with forgeries.

Settings → Domains → Sender logo → Set up shows the file, gives you the record to copy, and reads the other two back from public DNS, in words that say what to change.

The record

Name:  default._bimi.news.example.com
Value: v=BIMI1; l=https://app.sendly.now/bimi/<identity id>.svg;

The panel shows the exact name and value for each identity. Each identity gets its own record, at its own host, so mail.example.com and news.example.com can carry different logos. If you publish a record at the root (default._bimi.example.com) instead, every host under it that has no record of its own falls back to that one.

Replacing or removing the logo later changes what the URL serves. It does not change the record, so there is nothing to republish.

Uploading a logo

Upload an SVG from the panel, or over the API. Sendly rebuilds it into SVG Tiny PS, the restricted profile mailboxes require, and that rebuilt file is what the URL serves. The rebuild drops what design tools add for their own use and keeps the shapes.

The file has to:

• be square: the mailboxes crop it to a circle, so keep the mark inside the middle;
• draw with shapes. <text> renders only in fonts the reader happens to have, so it is refused: convert text to outlines before exporting;
• reference nothing outside itself: no embedded images, no links, no external fonts;
• come to 32 KB or less after the rebuild.

A file that does not fit is refused with the reason, and the logo you had stays in place.

curl -X PUT https://api.sendly.now/api/v1/domains/$DOMAIN_ID/logo \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDLY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "$(jq -n --rawfile svg logo.svg '{svg: $svg}')"

The answer carries the file as served, the record to publish (bimi_record), and a fresh DNS reading (readiness). GET the same path to read them again, and DELETE it to go back to the default. Uploading and removing need the domains:write scope; reading needs domains:read.

Which inboxes show it

A VMC is bought from a certificate authority and proves the mark is your registered trademark. Sendly does not issue one. Without one, Gmail and Apple Mail keep showing the initial they always did, so publishing the record costs you nothing there.

Mailboxes cache what they fetch. A new upload can take a day or more to appear in an inbox that has already shown your old one.

The name beside it

The logo sits next to the sender name, which you set per identity as well, with defaultFromName. See the sender name recipients see. The default monogram is titled with that name too, or with the project name when the identity has none.