How to get the verified checkmark next to your emails

People call it a lot of things — the “blue tick”, the “verified sender badge”, the “email verification checkmark”. In Gmail it’s a small blue checkmark shown next to the sender’s name, and it tells the recipient that the message is authenticated and the sender’s logo has been independently verified. It’s worth having: it lifts trust, open rates and the odds someone actually reads you instead of reflexively deleting.

First, clear up a common confusion

The verified checkmark has nothing to do with “email verification” in the list-cleaning sense. Verifying an email address (checking it exists and is deliverable — what our Email Verifier does) is about your recipients’ addresses. The blue checkmark is about proving your own identity as a sender. Same word, completely different thing. This guide is about the second one.

What the checkmark actually requires

Under the hood, Gmail’s checkmark is BIMI plus a certificate. To earn it you need, in order:

1. Authenticated mail. Valid SPF and DKIM, aligned with your From: domain.
2. DMARC at enforcement. Your DMARC policy must be p=quarantine or p=reject — not p=none. This is the gate everything else waits behind.
3. A BIMI record pointing to your logo, published at default._bimi.yourdomain.
4. A VMC — a Verified Mark Certificate. This is the piece that turns a plain BIMI logo into the checkmark. A VMC is issued by an approved authority after they confirm you own the trademark for the logo; a newer CMC (Common Mark Certificate) covers non-trademarked logos in some cases, though provider support differs.

In short: no enforced DMARC, no checkmark. No certificate, no checkmark. Everything else is straightforward once those two are true.

The realistic prerequisites and costs

• A registered trademark for your logo (for a VMC). This is the longest lead-time item if you don’t already have one — trademark registration can take months.
• An annual certificate fee paid to the certificate authority.
• An SVG Tiny P/S logo — validate it with the BIMI SVG Validator before you buy anything.
• Enforced DMARC that you’ve monitored long enough to trust — rushing to p=reject without watching reports first is how you lose legitimate mail.

The path, start to finish

1. Get SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing and aligned. Verify with the Email Health Check.
2. Monitor DMARC at p=none with our DMARC monitoring until you recognise every legitimate sender, then move to quarantine and reject.
3. Prepare and validate your SVG logo.
4. Obtain a VMC (or CMC) from an approved authority.
5. Publish the BIMI record with both the logo (l=) and certificate (a=) tags — build it with the BIMI Generator.
6. Confirm everything with the BIMI Checker, then send yourself a test.

If the checkmark still isn’t appearing

Give it time — providers cache and roll out gradually — and re-check the usual suspects: DMARC genuinely at enforcement with pct=100, the SVG passing the profile validator, the certificate valid and reachable, and the logo/cert URLs on clean HTTPS. For the full logo walkthrough (including the difference between a self-asserted BIMI logo and a certified one), see how to add a BIMI logo. The authoritative source for certificate types and provider support is the BIMI Group.